Working across a range of disciplines including painting, drawing, film, video, and photography, Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinikethan, India and educated in the UK. She now lives and works in London. Her works possess a stark but poetic resonance. Drawing from her training in art history as well as from literary sources and postcolonial writers and thinkers, her art is shaped by her interest in the human condition, and how larger historical narratives from across the globe collide with the often-undocumented personal stories. Her practice explores the complexities of racial and gendered power relations born out of tangled colonial histories – especially regarding India and Europe. Her work converses creatively with for instance the paintings by Dutch seventeenth century artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, artists of the seventeenth century moment of European encounter with and plundering of, but also sometimes aesthetic exchange with, the rich and ancient cultures of the Indian subcontinent and Asia. Like thread unraveling and raveling in fabric, Sutapa Biswas’ practice weaves conceptually across time and space, inviting the viewer to speculate on constructions of their own identity in relation to the themes within her art.

Sutapa Biswas graduated with a BA in Fine Art with Art History from Leeds University (1985) that was followed by a postgraduate degree at the Slade School of Art (1990) where she was taught by artists Stuart Brisely, Susan Hiller, Helen Chadwick and Phyllida Barlow. She was later a research student at the Royal College of Art (1995-98).  

Sutapa Biswas participated in the emergence of the Black Arts Movement in Britain in the mid-1980s being selected immediately following her graduation for the landmark exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid, Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1985 where she showed her monumental work, Housewives with Steak-knives (1983-85) acquired for Cartwright Hall, Bradford Museums, by Nima Poovaya-Smith, and her video work Kali (1983-85), acquired by TATE Collection in 2017.

Sutapa Biswas’ works have been exhibited internationally. Reviewed widely including in the New York Times and the Financial Times, in 2021-2022 she held concurrent major UK solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge University, and BALTIC, Gateshead, and at Autograph, London. Other venues that have hosted her works include Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven), The British Museum, ‘Mixed Bathing World 2015’ Triennial (Beppu, Japan), 6th Havana Biennial, Neuberger Museum (New York), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Melbourne International Arts Festival, Whitechapel Gallery (London), Arnofini (Bristol), Iniva (London), and ICA (London). Previous solo exhibitions have been hosted by Nara Roesler (Brazil), Iniva (UK touring), Douglas Cooley Gallery (Reed College, USA), PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg, Canada) in collaboration with Locus+ (Newcastle Upon Tyne,UK), Leeds City Art Gallery and The Photographer’s Gallery (UK). 

She has been a Visiting Artist at Mills College, USA (1994), and is a European Photography Award 1994 nominee. In 2008, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art and received the Correnah W.Wright Endowment Fund and The National Endowment for the Arts Award.  Sutapa Biswas is a recipient of the Yale Center for British Art Visiting Scholars Award 2019-20 (Yale University), and the Art Fund Award 2019 that made possible through the Moving Image Fund for Museums, an ambitious new film, Lumen, 2021, co-commissioned with FVU (London), Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, BALTIC and additionally supported by Autograph and Arts Council England.  Her artworks are in public collections including TATE, the Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council England, Reed Gallery, USA, Graves Gallery, Sheffield Museums and Galleries, UK; Cartwright Hall, Bradford Museum and Art Gallery; Oldham Art Gallery; Rochdale Art Gallery; Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, UK.