Haloi’s Radicalism Arrives At Frieze Masters: In Conversation With Akar Prakar’s Reena Lath

Frieze London opened on October 14 in The Regent’s Park, with Frieze Masters alongside it until October 18. As part of the recent wave where we find several Indians not simply participating but also dictating the conversation on international platforms, Indian artists and galleries are once again well represented this year at Frieze London. One of them is in the form of the Akar Prakar gallery, which has brought the painter Ganesh Haloi — whose works remind one of the Constructivists if they were florid, think Wassily Kandinsky — to Spotlight, the Masters section curated by Devika Singh and Sofia Gotti.

Frieze describes this as the largest Spotlight to date, a run of solo presentations of 20th-century artists who merit fresh attention. Haloi shares the section with another Indian artist, Nihar Ranjan Chowdhury, shown by Art Exposure. To dig more on the story of how Haloi arrived at Frieze, we were able to land a conversation with one of the Akar Prakar founders, Reena Lath.

By Invitation Only

Spotlight is an invitation-only section, with the curators choosing the artists. Lath says the format suited Haloi. “The presentation is focused and historically grounded,” she explains, limited to six works. It “sets the context for his later works, which are more minimalistic and more abstract.”

She also had the fair’s audience in mind: curators, museum acquisition committees and collectors “who are interested in the art historical perspectives these presentations bring.” For an artist with Haloi’s institutional recognition, she says, early works on canvas and paper tell “a wider story of modernism in the context of South Asian art.”

It is also a first for the gallery. “Akar Prakar has been working with the artist for over two decades, and this is the first time we are presenting him outside of an institutional framework.”

On The Walls

The six works are four oils on canvas and two on paper, one in pen and ink and one in pen and watercolour. They hang in a sequence that moves from early tonal restraint towards greater chromatic intensity, tracing how his abstraction deepened across two decades. The gallery points to a nocturnal vertical canvas from 1970 of stark tonal drama. The two works on paper show the searching, rhythmic quality of his line.

Partition runs beneath all of it. Haloi was born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh, and moved to Calcutta in 1950. The gallery says that displacement, and the longing it produced, is a quiet undertow through every work on show.

Respected At Home, Collected Abroad

“In India, Haloi is a respected senior figure with a long-standing collector base and critical reputation,” Lath says. Abroad, she says, his market presence comes from collectors in several countries building holdings over time, with auction activity in India and overseas that has been “active and consistent.” She also cites two major retrospectives, in Mumbai and Kolkata, with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

What matters, she says, is that “collectors can access a serious body of work behind him, as the artist is still creating works of quality.” She adds: “In fact, he’s one of those artists who continues to evolve in his art even at the age of 90.”

Lath is quick to correct the idea that he is unknown outside India. “Just to clarify, his works have been extensively exhibited internationally,” she says, naming the 8th Berlin Biennale, Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, the Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and DRAF in London. “It’s just that this body of work has not been seen outside of India.”

Letting The Paintings Carry It

Showing such rooted work to a new audience raises the question of how much to explain. “Many international viewers don’t know the scale of the Indian art world, the effect of Partition in India, or the Ajanta project, and the paintings are richer once you do,” Lath says. But she is wary of overdoing it. “There is a risk in over-explaining. We try to give just enough background, then let the paintings carry the rest.”

On Ganesh Haloi

Haloi (b. 1936) is a Kolkata-based painter whose career has unfolded almost entirely in Bengal and in the seven formative years he spent at Ajanta. He graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, in 1956. The Archaeological Survey of India then appointed him to create documentation replicas of the Ajanta murals, work that ran from 1957 to 1963. The murals date from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE. While working on figuration for the project, he developed a visual language in which landscape and terrain are reduced to the most basic forms and lines.

From 1963 until he retired in 1993 he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts, Calcutta. He has been a member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta, since 1971. Besides Documenta 14 and the Berlin Biennale, his international showings include Architecture of Life at Berkeley and A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London.

Recent solo shows include Re-citations: rhymes, about land, water and sky at Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, with KNMA (2024), Re-citing Land at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai (2022), and The Architectonics of Form at Akar Prakar (2022). He was recently conferred the Banga Bibhushan, West Bengal’s highest civilian honour, for his contribution to the arts.