(b. 1966)
Born in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala in 1966, Shibu Natesan completed his B.F.A in Painting from College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, in 1987 and Masters in Printmaking from M.S. University, Baroda in 1991. He also completed a two-year residency at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, funded by the Netherlands government in 1997. The cultural environment in Kerala where Shibu Natesan was trained as an artist helped him develop his humanistic understandings and sensibilities and led him to contextualise his own work in the present situation. His images are collected from the media and popular culture, and represented with humorous intervals. The critical realism, Shibu’s engagement, is generated from his reflections on the presuppositions of everyday life and he achieves it by transforming them into metaphors. In his work, the use of photography is more literal in which he has been able to displace or subvert the meaning without altering its appearance. They seem to be a part of a process of feigning which resembles the original to a startling degree, but which in fact prompts a set of readings which are contrary to what was intended, thus displacing the meaning without significantly altering its appearance. He has held several solo exhibitions and group shows across India and abroad. Solo exhibitions include ‘Existence of Instinct’, New Delhi in 2005; ‘Linkage’, Amsterdam in 2001 & 1997; ‘Paintings’, Bangalore in 2002; ‘Missing’, Mumbai in 1999; ‘Nature Morte’, New Delhi in 1997; ‘Futility of Device’ in Mumbai in 1995. He was awarded a gold medal from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1991, and the “Uriot Prize’ from the Rijksakademie van Beeldande Kunsten in Amsterdam, in 1996. He lives between Vadodara and London.