In collaboration with Birla Academy Of Art And Culture
Outreach and Program Partner: Akar Prakar

Ganesh Haloi’s style cannot be defined by a single quintessential style, a wide range of pictorial variants and strategies, mediums and techniques mark his oeuvre. He neither claims to be a landscape painter nor a pure abstractionist. Alluding to the impulses of the environment—flood, breeze, or maybe the act of crossing the river, are all captured through a visual poetics in his early works. Over the years Haloi’s artistic preoccupations have concreted around re-composing land, reinterpreting nature through the unspoken verses of the sky and the water, through interchangeability of form and space.

In his minimalistic works, one can register an orchestration of formal elements laid out not for simple delectation but for posing new problems. Interpretation of colour pigment on paper with the complex methods of layering them on the surface, appear as explorations he made in a playfully decentered world. With more than hundred artworks on display, this exhibition is a curatorial weave, evoking Haloi’s inscape of shifting configurations and vantage points not limited to his engrossment in capturing the untranslatability of experience, which ceaselessly gains forms within the flow of time. Renowned for his gouache on paper colour terrains, Haloi’s command on Chinese ink drawings on Japanese scroll paper along with linear minimalistic drawings with ink, tempera works on board, and works on Ajanta will embellish the exhibition.

About the artist

Ganesh Haloi (b.1936) was born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the Partition of India. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work as it did on some other painters of his generation. Since then his art has exhibited an innate lyricism coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts. He has been a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971.

He has participated in several group exhibitions in India, Documenta 14 at Athens & Kassel, Greece/Germany; Architecture of Life at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives at BAM/PFA, Berkeley, California; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and Over the Edge, Crossing the Line: Five Artists from Bengal at KNMA, Delhi. He is represented by Akar Prakar Kolkata and New Delhi, and has had various solo exhibitions in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka and New York including Re-citing Land at The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS, Mumbai in collaboration with KNMA, Delhi 2022; The Architectonics of Form at Akar Prakar Kolkata and New Delhi in 2022, Form & Play at Asia Week New York in 2020 to name a few. The artist lives and works in Calcutta, India.