Chandraguptha Thenuwara Sri Lankan , b. 1960
BLINDS: Hope, 2021
Acrylic on Canvas
92 x 153 cm
36 1/4 x 60 1/4 in
36 1/4 x 60 1/4 in
Copyright The Artist
Most of us spent more time looking out of the windows of our homes this last year than in any other year. Created in the year following the year-long lockdown...
Most of us spent more time looking out of the windows of our homes this last year than in any other year. Created in the year following the year-long lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thenuwara’s exhibition Landscape was a meditation out of the artist’s studio in his home. The effects on the artist of a year spent in and out of lockdown seeps through in the particularly intimate and vulnerable quality of his work.
In Hope, the image of Madonna is seen against a gleaming gold backdrop. Through Thenuwara’s deft marriage of the figurative and the abstract, the painting merges the foreground and the background leaving the viewer confounded on whether the figures in the painting have become part of the abstraction or if they are merely concealed beneath it.Through metaphors of blinds that partially obscure the view the artist probes the viewer to read between the lines and question their sociopolitical truths.