Chandraguptha Thenuwara Sri Lanka, b. 1960

Chandraguptha Thenuwara is a Sri Lankan artist, activist, curator and professor. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s work is consistently led by his political activism. Throughout whatever medium he works in, Thenuwara’s art deals with the politics of memory and violence, interweaving classic motifs associated with Sri Lankan history as his own personal iconography, including the lotus, Buddhist stupa, barricade, camouflaged soldier and white van. 

Untitled IV is part of Covert Drawings, a series of ink on paper works which were created alongside the artist’s welded metal installation, Covert, which is currently featured in the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition Personal Structures (March – November 2022), held alongside the 59th Venice Biennale. The two-metre-tall sculpture consists of line drawings which intertwine some of Thenuwara’s trademark political motifs, such as fallen bodies, barbed wire and guns, which were welded and moulded around a hollow drum. Described by Saskia Fernando gallery as “a monolith representation of his explorations of Sri Lankan politics since 1997,” the Covert Drawings explore the same sculptural forms, imagery and political references which are so vital to Thenuwara’s practise.

Based in Sri Lanka’s capital of Colombo, Thenuwara (b. 1960), studied for his BFA at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, achieving his MFA at the Moscow State Institute in the USSR in 1993. Three years later he founded Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA), an art school to support Sri Lanka’s growing contemporary art scene. In the late 1990s, Thenuwara also began curating memorial exhibitions of his own work, displayed on 23 July every year in memory of ‘Black July,’ the Anti-Tamil program and period of massive violence in Sri Lanka throughout July 1983.

These self-curated exhibitions included a series entitled Barrelism, which Thenuwara defined as art reflecting the change in Colombo’s cityscape during the conflict. This art form appropriates typical objects of militarism, such as barrels, roadblocks, gates and walls, painted in the colours of camouflage. In 2019, Thenuwara returned to this theme in a new miniature series, Neo-Barrelism. With the Sri Lankan civil war having come to an end in 2009, the barrels, roadblocks and checkpoints were now encased in brass, becoming faded, yet historic objects which bore the “imprints” of the past. Thenuawara has also created several public monuments in Colombo since the civil war, including the Seeduwa monument to the Disappeared and Monument to Neelan Thiruchelvam, the assassinated human rights activist.

For over twenty years Thenuwara has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions internationally including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Colombo, Sri Lanka; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, India; Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Shanghai Zendau Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan. In 1997, Thenuwara was featured in Cities on the Move, a major travelling exhibition showcasing East Asia’s urban development and curated by renowned curators and critics Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. Most recently, a sculptural installation by the artist was included in Personal Structures, a group exhibition by the European Cultural Centre held during the 59^th Venice Biennale, (March – November 2022).

Currently serving as Director of VAFA, Thenuwara is also Senior Lecturer at the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Columbo, where he lives and works.