Sutapa Biswas
Blue bird with orange bill, 2025
- Medium
- Acrylic and graphite on watercolour paper
- Dimensions
- 30.5 × 21.16 cm, unframed
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0066
About the work
A long-tailed bird perches among branches and flowering foliage, its orange bill and red eye standing out against carefully articulated feathers. The pale paper leaves the surrounding landscape open, directing attention towards the relationships between bird, leaf and blossom. Made in 2025 in acrylic and graphite, the work brings close observation into an image whose colour and pattern invite lingering attention.
About the artist
Sutapa Biswas (born Santiniketan, India, 1962) is a British artist working across painting, drawing, photography, film and installation. She moved to Britain in 1966, graduated in Fine Art with Art History from the University of Leeds in 1985, completed postgraduate study at the Slade in 1990 and later undertook research at the Royal College of Art.
Her work connects intimate, often undocumented experiences with histories of colonialism, migration, race and gender. Time, memory and the relationship between people and their surroundings recur across media. She became an important figure in the Black British arts movement of the 1980s, showing Housewives with Steak-knives and Kali in Lubaina Himid’s landmark exhibition The Thin Black Line at the ICA in 1985.
Later works include Birdsong (2004) and Lumen (2021). Major exhibitions at BALTIC and Kettle’s Yard in 2021–22 brought several decades of her practice into view. Her work is held by Tate, the Government Art Collection, Arts Council England and other public collections. Alongside her artistic practice, Biswas has taught fine art and art history extensively.