H.A. Karunaratne is widely considered the father of abstract art in Sri Lanka. Karunaratne exhibits masterful dexterity in exploring the interplay between diverse materials—ranging from fabric to metal—to evoke a sense of rhythm, energy, and dissonance. Karunaratne's distinctive artistic approach bears resemblance to Abstract Expressionism and is deeply influenced by Buddhist and Zen philosophies. 

With a career spanning over six decades, Karunaratne is a distinguished artist and pedagogue renowned for his profound impact within the country’s art institutions. He has been honoured with the ‘Kala Suri’ by the Government of Sri Lanka and ‘The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays’ by the Japanese Government. His work is held in private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, and national museums in Japan including the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama, Himeji City Museum of Art, Himeji, and National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Fukuoka Collection.

H.A. Karunaratne has been described as a lone and enigmatic artist who has largely stayed away from exhibiting and selling his work. Yet he is also cited as a key figure within the field of abstraction in Sri Lanka. Tracing the trajectory of his work more closely, however suggests that Karu’s work sidesteps these easy dichotomies and labels, and does not sit easily inside the established canon. 

This exposure to printmaking in Japan, and how it opened up and fuelled Karu’s pursuit of abstraction, is interesting to consider. Printmaking is abstract by its very nature is the abstraction of one image to make another. It is about process as much as product, involving labour of the body, and requiring a degree of ‘letting go.’ All of this manifests in Karu’s practice even today. The cultural and spiritual context within which he studied also impacted his approach to abstraction, in particular the emphasis of Zen Buddhism on producing one’s essence, becoming one with the work and liberating the mind. However, it is important to remember that these influences were not one-way or limited to Karu. Artistic exchanges in the 1950s between Europe, the U.S. and Japan included a Zen Group being formed in Germany, and American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning citing Zen Buddhism as an influence. In this post-war period, several global artists were exhibiting in Tokyo and many Japanese artists were drawing from Abstract Expressionism and Colour field paintings. This sheds light on the context in which artists like Karu went from Japan to the U.S.   

Considering Karunaratne’s work against the heady mix of internationalism and war-instigated existentialism may help us to see it in a different light (especially as it continued to be shared in transnational circuits from the 1960s onwards). This may be one reason why Karu continued to pursue abstraction when he returned to Sri Lanka and began teaching in the late 1970s and 1980s. Surrounded by a sea of figuration, Karunaratne chose to focus on expanding his practice into abstract prints, murals, sculptures and paintings. One could read this focus on his work as another way of being present. His central concern in a desire for freedom and a quest for creativity is reflected in the many phases his practice underwent in the 1990s and 2000s. He describes this pursuit of stillness and nothingness against such a milieu by saying, “a void…speaks loudest.”