Ganesh Haloi was born in 1936, on the banks of the Brahmaputra in Jamalpur, Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh, and following the partition of India, he moved to Kolkata in 1950. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata. He then joined the Archaeological Survey of India as a resident artist where he was deputed to document the Ajanta cave paintings from 1957 to 1963. Thereafter he joined Art College Kolkata in 1964 as a lecturer and stayed on until his retirement.

Haloi has a very strong sense of oneness with nature, especially landscape, one of his deepest source of inspiration. He merges with the landscape so much that he loses his own identity; there is no sense of alienation for him. “My feelings and affection are here. The mountains, the people playing folk songs on the banks, I do not think it is something separate from me. I am not apart from the landscape”, he says. His initial work includes study of miniatures at Banasthali (Rajasthan) and copying Ajanta frescoes for six years. While working at Ajanta, Haloi was mesmerized by the magnificent murals of Visvantara Jataka, the lotus motifs, 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 colours 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. Eventually, Haloi turned to abstract renderings of landscapes. Dots, dashes, lines became cryptic signs for trees, water, green fields. A sense of nostalgia for a lost world pervaded these paintings. The picturesque landscape of his pre-partition hometown inspired the greenery and moisture-laden lands in his paintings. Through his work, he developed a sublime conversation between the land, sky, air and water; without any human presence.”Isolation is the most important factor in these paintings. You are alone with nature, and then you become part of it –you participate in it.” – Ganesh Haloi.

A refreshing interlude came when Haloi did some architectural paintings after a tour of the ruins of Gour Pandua in north Bengal. Haloi’s abstraction, filtered to their present pure dimensions, contain within them hidden civilizations and imagined landscapes of what was lost in transition. Haloi spent weeks gathering shells by the shore, recording the sound of the sea as it ebbed and flowed. He carried with him the rhythm of the ocean until it had become a part of him and his art. Distilled seascapes or landscapes, Haloi’s temperas and oils contain depths beyond the abstracted forms of quiet green-blues, sienna-rust and yellow-grays. Beneath the abstraction brown or smudging ofdove and white, are cornices, arches, gateways – remnants of architectural structures,layers and layers under the surface.

Since 1971, he has been a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists. Haloireceived 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.