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Joseph Clark Collection

Sutapa Biswas

Born 1962, Shantiniketan, India · Painting, drawing, film and photography

Sutapa Biswas is a British conceptual artist, born in Shantiniketan, India, in 1962 and based in London, who works across painting, drawing, film and photography. She was part of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, and her work is in the collections of Tate and Cartwright Hall, Bradford.

In the collection

About the artist

Sutapa Biswas was born in Shantiniketan, India, where her father, an ecologist, was teaching at Visva-Bharati University, and moved to London with her family in 1966, aged four; she still lives and works there (Sutapa Biswas). She studied fine art and art history at the University of Leeds, graduating in 1985, took her postgraduate degree at the Slade School of Art in 1990 and was a research student at the Royal College of Art from 1995 to 1998 (Sutapa Biswas). She works across painting, drawing, film and time-based media (Wikipedia).

Biswas is counted among the key figures of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s (Sutapa Biswas). On graduating in 1985 she was selected by Lubaina Himid for The Thin Black Line at the ICA, London, where she showed the painting Housewives with Steak-knives (1983–85), now at Cartwright Hall, Bradford, and the video Kali, now in the Tate collection (Sutapa Biswas). Her work often deals with gender, cultural identity and the colonial histories between India and Europe (Sutapa Biswas).

In 2021 she held two solo exhibitions at once, Lumen at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, and at BALTIC, Gateshead (Wikipedia). Housewives with Steak-knives and Kali both appeared in Tate Britain's Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 in 2023 (Sutapa Biswas). The Joseph Clark Collection holds three of her works on paper: Magnesium Bird (2006), which she has linked to the birth of her son, Time Flies 02.08.2023 (2023) and Blue bird with orange bill (2025) (Joseph Clark Collection).

Sources

  1. Sutapa Biswas
  2. Wikipedia
  3. Tate
  4. Joseph Clark Collection

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