Born in Calcutta, Nikhil Biswas was an indefatigable art activist and a firm believer in collective action. He was a founder member of the Calcutta Painters Group, Chitrangshu Group, and Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta.

Biswas was committed to bringing about technical innovations as well as transformations in contemporary artistic thought. After receiving his diploma from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, in 1954, when the Indian art scene was in the midst of the abstract wave, Biswas proclaimed humanist preoccupations.

He worked as an illustrator for Bengali weeklies Darpan and Janasebak Saptahik, searching for significant images to express the political and social turmoil of his time. The struggling artist also worked as an art teacher at Mitra Institute, a government school, for a living.

The bulk of Biswas’s drawings emerged from his diaries which he used to maintain to keep up with his wide range of activities. His dark and mysterious figures embrace his iconic clown, a combating soldier, horses and women, and are done in thick black ink or fine lines. His human figures are expressed at the moment of mortal combat through which Biswas consistently tried to provide an outward dimension to the inner manifestation of pain.

Despite a very short life span, the artist produced a large body of work, mostly black and white drawings on paper. His paintings were exhibited in Germany posthumously and are in the permanent collection of Halle Museum in Dresden, Germany.