BIO + PRACTICE

Sudipta Modi is an Indian born British resident artist, works with photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, film, installation and performance.

She works with concepts by employing tenacious examination of theatricality, cinematic languages in art, which explores how cultural history particularly art history, social practice interferes with psychoanalytic landscape. Her works are researched which explores conventional and unconventional ways to repurpose media and materials.

Sudipta is best known for her striking use of colours in her on-going self-portraits that have interrogated themes around multitudes of female representation and fluid identity in the art and visual media history entangled with social issues, ecological concerns resulted by colonisation, and globalisation in post colonial era.

Sudipta was although born in Kolkata she spend her early childhood in Punjab. Later she moved to West Bengal where she grew up, in a large joint family, playing with cinema posters, film negative cuts, a variety of magazines, comics, newspapers, literature which exposed her to visual media from very early age that comes back in her artwork. As her family used to run a cinema hall which showed regularly national, regional and American films. During her childhood she had been actively engaged with cultural activities through education, local art schools and theatre groups equally being appreciated for her acting, and art in Howrah a twin city of Kolkata the cultural capital of India. She wrote some poems exploring modernism, had been associated with little magazine groups. While she was only 17 studying for a two years Diploma course in Western Painting in a local art school, her artwork was selected in the renowned art exhibition Rajya Charukala Utsav 1997, Kolkata, India which had left a massive impact on her to continue her career as an artist. This time she regularly visited Shantiniketan, observed free artistic practice encouraged in the world famous Viswabharati University and practiced sculpture under several renowned artists independently. Since then, alongside gallery based art practice, she regularly taught art in formal education and professional institutions and worked as a commercial artist to paint advertisements and signboards and as a spatial designer which is mainly a very male dominated area in India. She was associated with famous theatre group Chetona for a short time and went on to study Master's Degree in Theater and Mass Communication at Rabindra Bharati University. Although she remain dissatisfied as this time she was looking for a form which is not rigid as art neither as rigid as theatre rather amalgamation of both. She started to push the boundaries of the both in her art.

During this time on a regular basis she worked for children from marginalised families which she left behind due to an institutional conflict.

Primarily, a painter of abstract figurative style, Sudipta, first turned her interest in photography while she was painting various portraits of leading personalities as a cultural representative for her painting series Monologue (click to see) in 2009 this series had been collected widely. Later, when she moved to London UK she began to explore photography conceptually in her art and made vibrant on-going self-portrait series My Bath (click to see) in 2012.

This series she revisited to create installations, photo-montages and mixed media paintings to activate variety of social issues which has been a signature in her art over a decade now.

Her subject references philosophy, art history, cultural history, nuclear culture, colonial, post-colonial and globalised influences, ecology and social practice with an avid advocacy for a utopian world.

She collaborated with theatre actors, fine artists, street musicians, and live-media performance with native islanders to save the coral reef; also worked on new-media installations. Her installations comprise kinetic laser light, voice-over scripts, drawings, photo images, videos, scripted performances, and painting which create a multifarious narrative of time-lapse of cultural histories.

Sudipta received a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Wimbledon College of Arts, University Arts London, UK.

Her works are exhibited and collected in both public and private in the UK, Europe, Latin America and India, and across the globe.

Sudipta was commissioned to make art, design and brand exhibitions by various charities which held in Brent Museum, Croydon Museum, British Museum etc and works as a lecturer in Higher Education in London, UK.

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