Ganesh Haloi
Born in 1936 in Jamalpur (now part of Bangladesh), Ganesh Haloi was forced to migrate to West Bengal during the tumult of Partition. In Calcutta, where Haloi had settled along with his family, he joined the Government College of Art & Craft after being admitted to the commercial art section, where he acquired his personal style of sophisticated elegance and finish. Upon completion of his graduation, he joined the Archaeological Survey of India as a resident artist and was assigned the documentation of the cave paintings of Ajanta from 1957-63.
At around the same time, in the Sixties, he began his artistic career primarily as a painter of landscapes. Perhaps the picturesque landscapes of his lost homeland, imprinted as childhood memories, inspired in him the imagery of tender, verdant, moisture-laden lands 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-Seventies, Haloi was acknowledged as an accomplished landscape painter who could evoke metaphysical essences within an ordinary landscape. The transformation that began in the Seventies consolidated in the Metascape series of 1978, which demarcated a gradual transition from realism to abstraction.
Haloi received the gold medal from Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata in 1963-64 and 1970. In 1970, he was also conferred the Rabindra Bharati Award, Kolkatta, and in 1991 was the recipient of the Shiromani Puraskar, conferred by the Government of India. Ganesh Haloi lives and works in Kolkata.
His showcased work with us is a watercolor on paper 14x20 inches in size.