The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents, in collaboration with the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, the first-ever large-scale exhibition of eminent artist Ganesh Haloi in his city. The selected artworks span six decades of painting, from his early works with imprints of figural images to ever-transforming colour fields where nuances of abstraction allude to personal memories and affective experiences that shaped his responses to nature and architecture.
Haloi’s early works captured the various impulses observed in the natural environment – flood, breeze, ploughing of land, or river crossing. The mighty Brahmaputra as the lifeline and its different moods, the marshy lands and rich aquatic life come back to Haloi when he recalls his house in Jamalpur on the river banks. Water often entered their aangan/courtyard when the river became forceful. The ‘aangan’ as the first enclosure experienced as a child, both fenced and open, protective and vulnerable at the same time, evolved into a leitmotif recurrent in Haloi’s artistic oeuvre. Later on, Haloi’s visual imagination stretched this primordial form of spatial enclosure into an expansive field, with the closed boundary left broken or incomplete, allowing recollections to flood in. The Earth and how it moves its seasons, cycles, and space and time continuum are ruminations closest to Haloi’s life and art. His biographical writings abundantly and vividly recount Earth as the matter and metaphor for life.
Location
Birla Academy of Art and Culture, 108- 109, Southern Avenue, Lake Terrace, Kolkata- 700029