Celebrating Asian Art

Ganesh Haloi: A space left behind

Asia Week New York 2023 Online Exhibition »

D-43, First Floor
Defence Colony
New Delhi
Ganesh Haloi (born 1936) is a Kolkata-based artist, born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the Partition of India. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work as it did on some other painters of his generation. Since then his art has exhibited an innate lyricism coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts. He has been a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971.

He has participated in several group exhibitions in India, Documenta 14 at Athens & Kassel, Greece/Germany; Architecture of Life, at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives at BAM/PFA, Berkeley, California; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and over the edge, crossing the line five artists from Bengal at KNMA, Delhi.

Nandalal Bose

January 27-February 28
Curated by Debdutta Gupta
Nandalal Bose was perpetually drawing on cards and postcards. However, the pursuit of this activity was not just limited to him. He had instilled, both in his students as well as fellow professors, this practice of postcard drawing. Thus everyone, teachers and students alike, would remain engrossed in this vocation.

Most of Nandalal's cards are executed in monochrome-free from the bindings of colour. This approach set him apart from his Guru, Abanindranath Tagore. According to Abanindranth Tagore, lines are the containers within which colors are held. He was of the view that it was primarily through color that a painting could be brought to life. Nandalal, on the other hand, was extremely inquisitive about the many possibilities of lines. He found validation for his search in his encounter with Arai Kampo-leading him further towards his journey of monochromatic works.

It was his travels to East Asia that eventually paved the way for his huge body of work in brush and ink and strengthened his belief that black and white contain within them the potentialities of all the other colors. The printmaking techniques which became integral to the pedagogic practices of Kala Bhavana were also a result of Nandalal's travels to China and Japan. He had brought back with him various ukiyo-e prints and wood blocks.

In this current exhibition, Akar Prakar attempts to highlight how cards/postcards bring out tangents of Nandalal Bose that have remained unnoticed otherwise. This exhibition brings to light Nandalal’s departure from the earlier influence of Abanindranath Tagore to the influences that Ramakrishna, Rabindranath and Gandhi had on his art practice. It also highlights Nandalal’s search for spirituality within nature and the establishment of the Asian aesthetic mode. The exhibition thus showcases how all these tangents are present throughout his works and some of the best can be found in his cards and postcards.

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Debasish Mukherjee: Whispering Lanes

February 18-March 17, 2023
Curated by Siddhi Shailendra
The concept of spaces is often defined by the lines and limitations placed in a three-dimensional area, but what these primary geometrical definitions neglect to take into consideration is our inhabitation of these spaces. The weight of our experiences and memories within the walls of one’s home or the street crossed too often are woven into the fabric of the place. In his latest solo exhibition, artist Debasish Mukherjee makes use of these limitations, the elemental aspects of the spaces, the line, the architecture and the everyday objects to create visual metaphors in an effort to uncover the dormant stories of his past.

An aesthetic that combines the language of abstract expressionism and structural minimalism, Mukherjee experiments with the medium of sculptural installations, paintings, and textile-based works employing a purposefully limited color palette. The silhouettes of the ghats, the lanes, the structures, and the steps take on the manifestation of the city of Benares, a place that is his muse and a mystery yet to be solved. Having spent years of his childhood at his maternal grandmother’s house in Benares and then again as a student of painting at the Banaras Hindu University, he spent some of the most formative years of his life in the city.

A remembrance of the days gone by and the reality of its present, the essence of the city forms the premise of the suite of works displayed in this exhibition. With a history of countless cycles of destruction and revival at the center of its past, the works like Monsoon Fables and Pakka Mahal are a reference to the recurring historical and current displacement and resettlement of the populace. The carved-out bricks and grids of sites and lands, within the motif of the almirah wide open and submerged, connotes the idea of unlocking our memories of the familiar places of the past.

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