Rekha: Tilak Samarawickrema

Over a career spanning six decades, Samarawickrema has moved fluidly across disciplines with a polymathic vision. Rooted in heritage, his prolific practice synthesized a distinct visual language that derived its sensibilities from European design movements. Samarawickrema’s collaborations with artisans reinterpreted geometry, color, and space, transforming traditional techniques and motifs to create a new artistic language that resonated with the dynamic expressions of a contemporary global landscape. The artist is widely recognized for revitalizing Sri Lankan crafts through his work at the National Design Center of Sri Lanka and his collaborations with traditional weavers in Talagune, Udadumbara. Rekha brings together Samarawickrema’s tapestries, line drawings, etchings, animated film and sculptural work created between 1970 and 2025, celebrating the depth and breadth of his multi-disciplinary practice. 

Samarawickrema’s line drawings morph into moon-faced characters, with full, rounded bodies, exemplifying the curvaceous sensuality of the Sinhala alphabet, shaped by the tradition of writing on ola leaves. In his minimalist approach the artist lets his pen glide across the page—each stroke elongating, arching and unfolding into the vivid outline of folk characters. The artist anchored his exploration of this fundamental artistic element in the witty and humorous fables of the jester Andare. Via an exploration of mediums including drawings, animation and wire sculpture, the line was endlessly reimagined in Samarawickrema’s hands. 

The artist also played with its weight and materiality, liberating the line from the flatness of the page via his sculptural interpretations with wire and brass. Samarawickrema’s sculptures existed in two planes: as undulating strokes in metal, and as forms transformed by the interplay of light and shadow into weightless sculptural drawings in space. The marks from an architectural graduate's drawing board evolved into visually delightful expressions, mirroring the rhythm and essence that pulsated through South and East Asian art. In the 1970s Samararawickrema, then an architectural student in Italy, saw his drawings of Andare interpreted in an animated film produced by Coronna Cinematografica, which was subsequently presented as an Italian entry at the Oberhausen Film Festival. 

Samarawickrema’s experimentation with line continued in his tapestries. Conceived collaboratively with weaver communities from Thalagune Udadumbara, the artist introduced visual sensibilities derived from Bauhaus and Italian radical design movements into the centuries-old Dumbara weaving tradition. Colourful Gopurams and traditional dance costumes were distilled into bold colours and their elemental geometries, and were reconfigured to form the building blocks of the reimagined tapestries. The tautly stretched warp on the loom encountered the weft that moved through it, as the fixed and fluid aspects of the line came together in a single composition.