Shared vision

Reba Somnath: A Path Together, A Path Apart at Debovasha unfolded as a quiet meditation on proximity without sameness; two artistic lives shaped by shared time and space, yet distinct in temperament and ethical bearing. The exhibition placed Reba Hore and Somnath Hore in adjoining spaces, allowing their works to face one another without imposing narrative closure or reductive comparison.

Reba Hore’s works, primarily drawings and works on paper, carry an immediacy that feels instinctive rather than resolved. Drawing, for her, is not preparatory but a way of thinking through feeling. Her figures often appear suspended, accompanied by animals or gathered in quiet proximity. Colour plays a crucial role here: softened, absorbed, never declarative. It moves like emotion rather than description, creating an atmosphere of waiting, solitude, and inward attention. At times, the figure loosens into abstraction, as if identity itself were porous and provisional.

This sensibility finds its most affecting expression in her drawings of Somnath Hore in his last years. Ren­dered with remarkable restraint, these works are less portraits than acts of staying. The line is tentative yet attentive, allowing the paper’s white to breathe. These are not images of decline but of accompaniment, drawings made from within shared time rather than from a distance.

Across the gallery, Som­nath Hore’s works register­ed a different kind of intensity. While his practice is often associated with political ur­gency, the works at De­b­o­vasha revealed a more in­ward register. Many turned to­wards familial presence, daily observation, and the intimacy of shared life; others reflected his role as a teacher, attentive to gesture and form. Even in his portraits of Reba Hore, structure holds firm, while his youthful self-portrait carries the gravity of endurance rather than likeness. His practice confronts history; hers inhabits it.

Together, their practices articulate two ethical modes: one rooted in attentiveness and care, the other in steadiness and resolve. Debovasha’s understated curation allowed this dialogue to unfold without spectacle. The exhibition ultimately affirmed art not as a declaration, but as a sustained way of living with time, with uncertainty, and with one another.