Walking into the exhibition of works by the late Somenath Hore, at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre (till May 25), one enters what seem to be the final, anguished moments of a tragedy. Four pieces of bronze lie in the middle of a bare room (picture bottom), lit by a solitary light: the heads of a man, woman and their child, with a sinewy yet spectral hand placed before them. Their faces are shrivelled, eyes hollow, and lips puckered in pain. Shadows loom over them with a palpable heaviness; the rest is silence.

These eyeless creatures, forged out of a primal darkness, remind one of mad Lear’s advice to the brutally blinded Gloucester: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.” Hore’s theatre of suffering, which grew out of his lifelong absorption in what he had called “khotochinta” (wound-thoughts), demands to be looked at “feelingly”, as Gloucester had put it. This way of looking is at once sensual (since it involves feeling one’s way through life by touch) and intensely emotional (pure insight that transcends the senses). Behind Hore’s emaciated figures, depicted on paper or moulded out of bronze, is a history of unheard voices, crying out in agony, despair or even in rebellion, that only the eyes can hear. Absence and presence, silence and agonized cries: these opposites resonate together in this trio, which Hore had created in response to the Gujarat riots of 2002. The state of being human is pared down here to its last dregs, to only the dried, skeletal remains.

This is vintage Somenath Hore, the archivist of hunger and pain, who started out as a poster-painter for the Communist Party in the Forties and Fifties. The lithographs, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings from those times included in this show give a long perspective to the master’s signature style. The early works give a sense of the genesis of the more layered, white-on-white Wounds series (not part of this show) that followed later. Viewed chronologically, the works on display here reveal Hore’s increasing propensity for more complex techniques. It is also fascinating to note the transformation of a propagandist art into something rich and strange.

Hore’s early works are touchingly realistic, exquisitely rendered compositions. They depict peasants working in the fields, women threshing, people going about their rustic chores as “the dogs go on with their doggy life”, to use a phrase by Auden. In some images, the still centre of daily life is disturbed as comrades assemble on a meeting ground, processions in silhouette trudge along (echoes of the dance of death from Bergman’s Seventh Seal here). There is a comforting literalism in these figures tenderly held in different moments of being: a child, its face obscured by a bowl, drinks hungrily out of it; potbellied, malnourished boys huddle together; a mother suckles her baby, clasping it pietà-like to her bosom, her face crumbling in fierce abjection, as if from the pain of offering her own body for consumption.

This human drama is punctuated by vignettes of bestial intimacies, exploring the erotics of the animal world. Dogs in foreplay or a fight, agile monkeys or a seated man with a dog nestling close to him — such compositions capture the ripples that break on the surface of time, then go deep into the inscrutable crevices of the soul. As Hore’s vision of the human condition ripens, the trappings of flesh and bone peel off, revealing the inner workings and structures. Gentle touches of blue, green or brown are washed into mistiness to heighten the translucent bodies twisting and turning in misery. A rickshawpuller (picture top), his shoulder bones sticking out gauntly, resembles a winged creature, stooping under the burden of the self. The stick-like men and women bring to mind Giacometti’s figures, but without the latter’s erect horizontality. In Hore’s eyes, they crawl and crumple instead.

There is a generosity of spirit and a keenly-felt sensibility in Hore’s later works that make them more universal than they are usually thought to be. His visual consciousness is founded on an acute awareness of mortality, perceived not just by the self alone but also in the company of the Other — the beloved, a dog, even the begging bowl or the walking stick that one drags along to death.

Somenath Hore’s art addresses the mortal questions endlessly — and in the process, celebrates life as a journey from being to nothingness.