Born in Kerala in 1963, Bose completed his BFA from the J. J. School of Arts, Mumbai, before doing a Masters from Goldsmith's College, University of London . He has mounted a number of solo shows, the most prominent of these being, Amuseum (1992), Objects of Attention (1995), Dandy (1996), De Curating - Indian Contemporary Artists (2003) and the very recent Ghost: Transmemoir (2006), at Gallery Artsindia, NY.

Bose's work has no fixed centre; its relentlessly inventive inventory includes forays into installation art, as well as into minimalist abstraction and figurative works. Bose's first solo show in 1990, featured his black on black and white on white, abstract minimalist works on perforated paper, reminiscent of Braille texts; these works, which could not be touched or 'read', obliquely framed an ironic comment on conservative gallery decorum.

He has consistently explored the role of cultural/personal history and its negotiations with memory through his work. He has also been particularly interested in art history and the archival process: De Curating, for instance explores nostalgia and the process of canonisation. He also plays with the interrelated practices of documentation, representation, and memory in his photo-realistic paintings of viewers at art galleries. In Objects of Attention, he brought found-objects like books, lunch dabbas, etc., into the gallery, and 'objectified' them further, by placing these otherwise mundane, 'low value' objects under deliberate scrutiny in the gallery space - a gesture that forced the collision of spaces - of the quotidian and the spectacular, the 'high' and the 'low'.