Shibu Natesan was born in 1966 in Vakkom, Kerala. He completed his BFA in Painting from College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, in 1987. In 1991, he completed his MA in Printmaking from Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. he was selected for a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and won the Uriot prize.

His first significant body of work, a series of paintings entitled "The Futility of Device" derives from a feudal history excavated in painstaking detail, the relics displayed in the grim chambers of memory, symbols of aggression which repeat themselves with oppressive regularity. The atmospheric quality of these works, some of them based on photographs of archaeological remains such as the caves at Ajanta, is heightened by the use of metallic paint on canvas. His recent "Missing" series of paintings is representative of the change that occurred duing the time.The photographic clarity of Natesan’s paintings at first alludes to a straightforward representation of the real. His canvases are filled with blocks of bright colour like the glossy pages of a magazine and distracting details are stripped down to the minimum. Indeed, the precision of his technique, combined with the appropriation of images gathered from popular culture, lulls the viewer into a sense of the familiar, the recognised and the emotionally detached.

However, Natesan injects his realism with a sense of irony, and often humour, seamlessly juxtaposing the everyday with unexpected symbols to unbalance the viewer’s initial perceptions. His topics of focus range from power structures and moral breakdown to racism and the predicament of the migrant. Shibu's works are in important collections in India and abroad.

He lives and works between Trivandrum and London.