Artist

Ganesh Haloi

Ganesh Haloi was born in 1936 in Jamalpur, now in Bangladesh, and moved to Calcutta in 1950 post Partition. The trauma of the uprooting is reflected in most of his works. Though Haloi has worked in many media, he is known for his landscapes. Ganesh Haloi, one of India's most distinguished and admired artists, has a very strong sense of oneness with nature, especially landscape, one of his deepest sources of inspiration. He merges with the landscape that he loses his own identity; there is no sense of alienation for him. In the late 1950’s, when Haloi was assigned to reproduce the frescoes of Ajanta by the Archaeological Survey of India, the magnificent murals of Visvantara Jataka, the lotus motifs, mesmerized the artist; the mandalas, apsaras, demons and deities painted on the ancient cave walls. The work traces a memory of those early times, restrained and reined in; luminous veins hint at the more decorous forms and colors that gave his early works their vitality and life. The experience of Ajanta influenced Haloi profoundly. His work was marked by lyricism and worked in many mediums and initially painted figures in landscapes. The mood was inevitably poignant. Gradually, Haloi moved towards landscapes. A sense of nostalgia for a lost world pervaded these paintings. Eventually, Haloi turned to abstract renderings of landscapes. Dots, dashes, lines became cryptic signs for trees, water, green fields. In 1991 was the recipient of the Shiromani Puraskar, conferred by the Government of India.