Saskia Fernando Gallery
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Viewing Rooms
  • Channel
  • Fairs
  • News
  • Press
  • Profiles
  • About
  • Contact
Menu

Frieze London 2022: Booth IN09 | Regent's Park, London

Past event
12 - 16 October 2022 
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Frieze London 2022, Booth IN09 | Regent's Park, London

Saskia Fernando Gallery presents Covert Drawings by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, a series of ink on paper works created alongside the artist’s welded metal installation presented at the European Cultural Centre Venice during the 59th Venice Biennale this year. In creating the installation, Thenuwara sifted through his most salient bodies of work, each of them a meditation on a historic moment in Sri Lanka’s contemporary political history. Thenuwara lifted recurrent fragments from these series: the lotus, the stupa, the soldier, the barrel.  These references, swirling around throughout Thenuwara’s practice, are amalgamated in Covert. 

 

Thenuwara began his process by creating line drawings of his planned installation that was then blown up to scale. The motifs, piece by piece, were welded onto a drum to create a hollow centre. Rising over 200 centimetres in height, the work stands as a monolith representation of his explorations of Sri Lankan politics since 1997. In composing the shape of the column, Thenuwara references his early body of work titled Barrelism where he appropriated found tar barrels to question the ubiquity of military checkpoints in Sri Lanka’s civilian landscape. 

 

In Covert, his webs of motifs are glitches themselves – at first glance, they are alluring lattice works, then suddenly emerging from the lotus pods, buds, and leaves are the stern forms of soldiers, guns, daggers – the paraphernalia of war - all ensnared in prickly thorns. In Covert Drawings, Chandraguptha Thenuwara meticulously lays out these elements, lifted from the initial installation, to create a powerful visual index of this self-referential work. 

 


 

VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE HERE

VISIT THE ONLINE VIEWING ROOM HERE

 


 

  • Frieze
  • The New York Times
  • The Art Newspaper
  • USA Art News

Related artist

  • Chandraguptha Thenuwara

    Chandraguptha Thenuwara

Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Back to art fairs
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2023 Saskia Fernando Gallery
Site by Artlogic
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Send an email

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Join our mailing list

Signup

* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy (available on request). You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.