Praneet Soi was born in Kolkata in 1971. He left Bengal for the west coast of the country in 1990 where he studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharajah Sayajirao University, Baroda. The liberalized economic policies of the 1990's had ushered in an era of globalization and upon completing his Bachelor's and Master’s degrees, Soi worked as a visualizer within the advertising industry in New Delhi. In 1999 he left for California where he attended the University of California at San Diego on a schola
Soi moved to the Netherlands in 2002 to attend the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, a two-year international residency program for artists and currently divides his time between Amsterdam and Kolkata. This oscillatory movement impacts his practice. Soi identifies over time, patterns that emerge from an investigation of his extended social and economic landscape. In California it was the miniaturizing nature of the vast, undulating, suburban vista that caught his eye.
Moving to Amsterdam, media reportage of unrest in the Middle-East, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the events following September 11th led to a series of miniature paintings on terrorism and expanding from there, paintings of the human body. Site-specific wall paintings also emerge from these sources who’s further investigation led Soi to create an archive that traces his relationship with the media.