Shibu Natesan

Grosvenor art gallery's profile on Shibu Natesan:

Shibu Natesan lives in two countries, India and England, a situation that creates distance and dispels it at the same time, paradoxically emphasizing the anonymity, intimacy and distance in his recent works. His varied subject matter comes from the experience and his imaginative space along with the deliberate strategies he is employing in creating these photo realistic imageries. The cultural environment in Kerala where he was trained as an artist helped him to develop his humanistic understandings and sensibilities and led him to contextualise his own work in the present situation. Here he uses images culled from popular culture, media and injects them with a sense of humour and irony. Its his take on the industrialized society and globalised economy where he addresses the repressive forms of control, power structures, racism, migration and so on. The critical realism, Shibu is engaging with, is generated from his reflections on the presuppositions of everyday life and he achieves it by transforming them into metaphors. In his work, use of photography is more literal in which he has been able to displace or subvert the meaning without altering its appearance.