Ganesh Haloi

Born in Jamalpur in present day Bangladesh on 9 February 1936, Ganesh Haloi migrated with his family to Calcutta upon Partition.

From 1952-56, he studied at the city’s Government College of Arts and Crafts, where he acquired his personal style of sophisticated elegance and finish. Upon graduation, he joined the Archaeological Survey of India and was assigned the documentation of the cave paintings of Ajanta from 1957-63.

At around the same time he began his artistic career primarily as a painter of landscapes. The picturesque landscapes of a homeland imprinted as childhood memories inspired his imagery of tender, verdant, moisture-laden vistas in his paintings. Human presence was erased from his visual panorama, giving way to a sublime conversation between land and sky, air and water. By the mid-1970s, Haloi was acknowledged as an accomplished landscape painter who could evoke metaphysical essences within an ordinary landscape.

The transformation that began in the ’70s consolidated in the Metascape series of 1978, which demarcated a gradual transition from realism to abstraction. Since then, Haloi has made a significant contribution in building up a trend in contemporary painting of using abstract vocabulary to depict nature that goes beyond visual documentation, yet conveys the poetry of nature.

The artist, who lives in Kolkata, has received many honours such as seven gold medals from the Academy of Fine Arts, seven silver medals from the University of Calcutta, the Rabindra Bharati award, and the Shiromani Puraskar, among others.