Chandraguptha Thenuwara Sri Lankan , b. 1960
BLINDS: Ruwanweli, 2021
Acrylic on Canvas
70 x 90 cm
27 1/2 x 35 3/8 in
27 1/2 x 35 3/8 in
Copyright The Artist
'Created in the year following the year-long lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thenuwara’s exhibition was a meditation out of the artist’s studio in his home. The effects...
'Created in the year following the year-long lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thenuwara’s exhibition was a meditation out of the artist’s studio in his home. The effects on the artist of a year spent in and out of lockdown seeps through in the particularly intimate and vulnerable quality of his work.
In BLINDS: Ruwanweli, the sacred site of the Buddhist worship is obscured, as the artist reflects on the role of religious fundamentalism in the region.
Through Thenuwara’s deft marriage of the figurative and the abstract, the painting merges the foreground and the background leaving the viewer confounded on whether the figures in the painting have become part of the abstraction or if they are merely concealed beneath it.Through metaphors of blinds that partially obscure the view the artist probes the viewer to read between the lines and question their sociopolitical truths.