Arjuna Gunarathne
In my eye(s), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 96cm x 123cm
There are two Arjuna Gunarathnes. One is extraordinary. Every artistic medium springs to life when he puts his hand to it. Give him a pen and black ink and he will invent unprecedented and unforgettable surrealistic mutations of the human figure. Give him watercolours and wasli and he can create miniatures with a delicacy, wit and tonal poise matching the classic achievements of that South Asian tradition. With pastels to hand, or with staining ink washes, Gunarathne is instead explosively expressive, pushing saturated colours to an extreme of heart-stopping intensity.And then, switching from his virtuoso use of these lightweight media, the same artist wrestles with the hefty physicality of oil paint and persuades it to speak for him, establishing a highly individual brushwork that as it were combs through his own stout impastos. Gunarathne has collected all these different techniques and made each of them his friend, in the way that just a few people can strike up an immediate sympathy with whatever animal they happen to meet.The rest of us shake our heads in astonishment: how on earth do they do it? (I myself was one of those watching others, when I had the pleasure of getting to know the artist at the Royal Drawing School in London some four years ago.)
And then alternately, there is the Arjuna Gunarathne who is the most ordinary person in the world. We could almost name this person ‘Everyman’ - meaning by that, the fictional character whose experiences are typical of the human species in general. Just as in many a 20th-century book or film, this ‘Mr Normal’ is a mature male accompanied by a small family that he is trying to support. But in the pictorial fictions that we are now looking at, the protagonist - who also happens to be the artist - is equally defined as a migrant, a ‘displaced’ person. Twenty-first-century normality, as all of us realize, has that character. Humans now more than ever are on the move across the globe, pushed one way and then the other by their own hopelessly defective power structures. In fact Gunarathne’s major recent series of coloured-ink works on card, Legal or Illegal?, vividly pictures what it feels like to be caught in the middle of that pushing, just as his earlier black-ink series, Going to Work, found imaginative symbols for the distortions of their personhood that migrants undergo when recruited for insecure casual employment. The ordinary Arjuna Gunarathne - a Sri Lankan hired to work in a supermarket in north London - puts his anxiety and alienation to the service of his extraordinary artistic alter ego, to create emblems that could speak for hundreds of millions in the world of 2022.
To talk of ‘displacement’ is to suggest that ‘places’ exist. But what we see in this art is that the reality of places is more psychological than geographical. The figures in these pictures tend to be small in relation to an environment that engulfs or embraces them. The suggestion is that the individual has only a little power of his own with which to face a larger world that may - as in the oil paintings Boundaries and Twisted - present dangers and challenges, but that may also open out into a paradise: look at the ecstatic inventions of the recent mixed-media series, Wonder. And yet these larger worlds are all inside the artist’s head. The immigrant in suburban London shows how richer landscapes can arise, by transmuting tree and garden imageries from South Asia into unfamiliar media as symbolisms for his own states of mind.There is an empowering, generous and democratic intention to Gunarathne’s scintillating art
Twisted, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 118cm x 149cm
Newcomer 2, 2021, Water Colour on Wasli, 28cm x 35cm
Waiting, 2020, Water Colour on Paper, 25 x 18 cm
Newcomer 1, 2022, Water Colour on Wasli, 35 x 28 cm
Coloured Man 1, 2021, Water Colour on Wasli, 28cm x 36cm
Coloured Man 2, 2021, Water Colour on Wasli, 28cm x 36cm
Going to work 1–2, 2009, Ink on paper, 11 x 15 cm
Going to work 3–4, 2009, Ink on paper, 11 x 15 cm
Going to work 5–6, 2009, Ink on paper, 11 x 15 cm
Going to work 7–8, 2009, Ink on paper, 11 x 15 cm
Going to work 9–10, 2009, Ink on paper, 11 x 15 cm
A Day at the Park 1, 2019, Water Colour and Crayon on Paper, 13 x 20 cm
A Day at the Park 3, 2019, Water Colour and Crayon on Paper, 13 x 20 cm
A Day at the Park 2, 2019, Water Colour and Crayon on Paper, 13 x 20 cm
Wonder 1, 2022, Mixed Media on Paper, 42cm x 59cm
Wonder 2, 2022, Mixed Media on Paper, 42cm x 59cm
Wonder 3, 2022, Mixed Media on Paper, 42cm x 59cm
Wonder 4, 2022, Mixed Media on Paper, 42cm x 59cm
Legal or Illegal? 1–6, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 7–12, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 13–18, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 19–24, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 25–30, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 31–36, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal?
37–42, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Legal or Illegal? 43–48, 2022, 10.2 x 15.2 cm
Boundaries 1, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51cm x 51cm
Boundaries 2, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 50cm x 70cm
Pitch, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 75cm x 75cm
ARJUNA GUNARATHNE b. 1960
Education
2018 The Drawing Year Postgraduate Programme, Royal Drawing School, London, UK
2004 Miniature Painting Programme, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan
2002 Four-year course in Fine Art Programme, VIBAVI Academy of Fine Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Solo Exhibitions
2010 Me, Myself & I - Exhibition of drawings | Barefoot Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
2004 Exhibition of Paintings | ROHTAS 2 Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
2000 Exhibition of Paintings | VAFA Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
1995 Exhibition of Paintings | City Council Hall, Matale, Sri Lanka
Group Exhibitions (selected)
2021 Missing You | Windsor Castle, England, UK
2021 Highly Commended works -The Self-portrait Prize 2021 | Ruth Borchard Collection, UK
2020 Royal Drawing School | Summer Show 2020, London, UK
2018 Best of the Drawing Year | Christis, London, UK
2018 Royal Drawing School | Shoreditch, London, UK
2018 Space Studio, London, UK
2018 One Hundred Thousand Small Tales | Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh
2008 Artful Resistance | Crisis & Creativity in Sri Lanka | Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Italy
2007 Chilli Group | National Art Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
2007 Untitled | Lionel Wendt Art Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
2005 Sri Lankan Contemporary Art | National Art Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
2004 Aham Puram | Jaffna Public Library, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Collections
Contemporary British Art Collections, UK
The Royal Art Collection, UK
Contemporary Art Collection, India Art Collections, Sri Lanka
Residencies
2021 ‘Poetry in Aldeburgh’ | Festival Artist in Residence | Aldeburgh, England, UK
2021 ‘Draw the Build’ - Project at Royal Drawing School | London, UK
2021 IFLA- Issue 7 | London, UK
2019 Artist Residency at Dumfries House, Scotland, UK
Publications
2019 The A–Z of Conflict, published by Raking Leaves, Colombo, Sri Lanka