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Within Boundaries by Arjuna Gunarathne presents a walk-through of his ongoing experiments with a distinct and dynamic visual style — one where his acquaintanceship with South Asian mural and miniature painting seeks anchor. Through an intimate engagement with colour and texture, Gunarathne’s work reveals a private world of anxieties & vulnerabilities where lone figures in imaginary landscapes wait in wanting of warmth and familiarity.
Arjuna Gunarathne’s works are subject to the medium that the artist explores. 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 delicacy and tonal poise - continuing a several centuries old artistic tradition which the Mughals brought with them to the Indian subcontinent. With pastels to hand, or with staining ink washes, Gunarathne is instead explosively expressive, pushing saturated colours to an extreme of heartstopping intensity. The same artist switches from the virtuoso use of these lightweight media and 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.
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To talk of 'displacement' is to suggest that 'places' exist. The figures he paints are either engulfed or embraced by the vastness of the environment they find themselves in - suggesting that the individual has only a little power of his own with which to face a larger world. While the oil paintings Boundaries and Twisted present dangers and challenges, the mixed-media series, Wonder opens out into the possibility of a paradise. And yet these larger worlds are all inside the artist's head. What we see in Gunarathne’s art is that the reality of places is more psychological than geographical, where richer landscapes can arise, by transmuting tree and garden imageries from home.
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Arjuna GunarathneWonder 1, 2022Mixed Media on Paper42 x 59 cm
16 1/2 x 23 1/4 in -
Arjuna GunarathneWonder 2, 2022Mixed Media on Paper42 x 59 cm
16 1/2 x 23 1/4 in -
Arjuna GunarathneWondering 3, 2022Mixed Media on Paper42 x 59 cm
16 1/2 x 23 1/4 in -
Arjuna GunarathneWondering 4, 2022Mixed Media on Paper42 x 59 cm
16 1/2 x 23 1/4 in
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Arjuna Gunarathne
A Day at the Park 3, 2019Water Colour and Crayon on Paper
13 x 20 cm
5 1/8 x 7 7/8 in -
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In several of his works, bodies move from one painting to the other - one landscape to another - imagined or real, permitting us a glimpse into a very private and personal world. These bodies, held close to each other by an invisible twine, seek comfort and familiarity in each other's presence. The paintings then become the artist’s attempt to locate a sense of stability in moments made meaningful by the proximity of shared spaces.
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Arjuna Gunarathne
Boundaries 2, 2019Oil on Canvas
50 x 70 cm
19 3/4 x 27 1/2 in -
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Arjuna GunarathneGoing to work 4, 2009Ink on paper11 x 15 cm
4 3/8 x 5 7/8 in -
Arjuna GunarathneGoing to work 5, 2009Ink on paper11 x 15 cm
4 3/8 x 5 7/8 in -
Arjuna GunarathneGoing to work 6, 2009Ink on paper11 x 15 cm
4 3/8 x 5 7/8 in -
Arjuna GunarathneGoing to work 7, 2009Ink on paper11 x 15 cm
4 3/8 x 5 7/8 in
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Gunarathne’s paintings become a record of anxiety and alienation shrouded in the vivid intensity of colours, as he draws from his search for stability and experiences of relocating to a new place. Home and identity are interwoven into each other in their elusiveness. 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. The 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 as they adjust challenging circumstances in unfamiliar terrains.
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WITHIN BOUNDARIES | ARJUNA GUNARATHNE
Past viewing_room
