Born in 1936 in Jamalpur,Bangladesh, Ganesh Haloi lost his father at the age of nine and within two years came the Partition which uprooted him from his hometown in Mymensing district and reduced him to a flotsam for over a year on this side of the borders,drifting between refugee camps. In 1951,when he was a student at the Government College of Art & Craft,Calcutta his address was platform number 12,Howrah Station.
Unlike his peers,whose art was shaped by the suffering and pain of the Partition and the riots that followed, the life of struggle has never had any bearing upon his art. The agony of bare existence has never been stronger for him than his agony of life in art. Ganesh Haloi has always been in pursuit of purity of an artistic idiom that adequately transforms his personally perceived spaces of existence into visual spaces in art. Nature has been the mainstay of this perception,formed quite early in life when he was quite young in his native East Bengal. It was closely linked with his growing awareness of all the forms of existential spaces that stretch spiritually and physically ,both as fluid and solid reality, away from his subjectivity. Later in life his art added a third dimension to that awareness. Art enabled him with a means to trace the contours of those spaces in terms of pictorial structures defined in all the interactive plastic components of a created image.
After completing his education at the art college Haloi joined the Archaeological Survey of India as resident artist and documented the cave paintings of Ajanta between 1957-1963. After his stint at Ajanta,he joined his Alma Mater and taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts,Calcutta from 1963-1993.
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