In the spotlight..

Ganesh Haloi is having his moment in the sun – at the grand old age of 81. The senior Bengal artist has 27 works at Documenta 14, the prestigious exhibition held once in five years in the German city of Kassel. And this is not Haloi's first exhibition on a prominent international platform. In 2014, Haloi was one of the six Indian artists at the 8th Berlin Biennale; while in early 2016, he was the only Indian on the roster of distinguished international artists at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Recognition abroad may be a dubious measure of an artist's worth, but there's no doubting that it carries a lot of weight in India. Especially, for someone like Haloi who, despite all his acclaim among a select cognoscenti, has been little seen or known outside Kolkata. Haloi's last solo outside Bengal was in Mumbai in 2011, and in Delhi way back in 2006. His participation in group shows out of his home state too, has been sporadic. Even at auctions, few of his canvases have come up for sale, and in the rare instances that they have, they sold for very moderate sums – the highest being `12.5 lakh at the Christie's December sale in Mumbai in 2016. That's modest, given how even contemporary artists, a few years into their careers, are snapped up for tens of lakhs.

Art critic Ina Puri, who has followed Haloi over the years and was closely associated with his solo exhibition in 2006 at Delhi's Lalit Kala Akademi curated by the artist Manjit Bawa, feels that the Documenta14 participation is a big honour – "high time" such recognition came his way. "Ganesh da is one of the most important painters of our generation," she says. Haloi's relative obscurity she blames on his being "very shy, private, and not at all into self-promotion". "Even with the Documenta, he didn't want to go to Kassel or earlier, to Berlin," she says.

For all his reticence, however, the artist sounds warm and forthcoming during a conversation over the phone from Kolkata. "The paintings at Documenta were done over the last two-three years. Compared to my earlier works, they are very simplified, almost minimal in line and colour." Nature, he says, is his inspiration. "I was born in Mymensingh [now in Bangladesh]. My house was near the Brahmaputra and in the monsoon, the river would come up to the porch. Since childhood I have had a very close relationship with nature. I paint from it a lot."

Haloi shifted to Calcutta after Partition, and trained at the city's famed Government College of Art & Craft. But it was his seven-year stint at Ajanta, where he was employed to make copies of the murals for the Archaeological Survey of India that had a lasting impact on his work. Since the 1970s, Haloi has been part of the Society of Contemporary Artists, an important collective that included Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Somenath Hore and almost every major artist from Bengal from the 1960s onwards.

"What is good and what is high art is not affected by market. It'll find its place," says Reena Lath of Akar Prakar Gallery, who, along with her husband Abhijit, are responsible for this surge of interest in Haloi. The exhibitions in Europe in the last couple of years, she says, has resulted in him being picked up by several museums there.

Private museums such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi and the Piramal Museum of Art in Mumbai are collecting Haloi, and discussions are on with the National Gallery of Modern Art for a retrospective.