Locally and globally, Covid-19 has seen us all confronted with uncertainty and a cultural and socioeconomic crisis. Many emblematic artists and personalities have attempted to explore this uncertainty and present an aesthetically curated point of view on the crisis.
While economists, scientists, and politicians grapple with solutions to the crisis, artists strive to explore its impacts by taking different paths to address it in an empathetic manner that awakens the public and shares a strong visual message.
In the Sri Lankan context, contemporary artists have also started to align their artistic work to create a stronger and healthy dialogue within the community to generate awareness of the current socioeconomic and cultural conflicts and provide context on solutions through their own aesthetic language.
This is the task that ‘6,’ an exhibition by six experienced and well-established contemporary artists with synergetic interests, aims to address. The artists behind ‘6’ have gathered to exhibit their creative work to raise their voices within the community.
These six young artists – Shanaka Kulathunga, Prabath Samarasooriya, Kasun Indikatihewage, Vimukthi Sahan, Vikum Bandara, and Anupa Perera – will be presenting their various genres of art, painstakingly done during the pandemic period while spending their lives in a ‘home-locked’ situation.
This exhibition will be a turning point in the history of group art shows in Sri Lanka, as it tells the stories of six different views from six different backgrounds and disciplines within a larger, vibrant creative setting.
Info box
‘6’ will take place at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery from 25-27 November 2022
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The artists behind ‘6’
Shanaka Kulathunga
An award-winning portrait artist (and senior medical officer), Shanaka uses his portraits to express a greater degree of emotional and spiritual expression through stocking and layering of colour. Humanity, compassion, and emotions are the key pieces of his artistic language.
Prabath Samarasooriya
With over 20 years of experience in art, fashion, illustration, and design, Prabath’s expression of his art is through nature, humanity, and radicalism, using his long-term involvement in fashion and design. His recent work carries a powerful expression of beauty through radical truth and explores sociocultural factors through enigmatic symbols.
Kasun Indikatihewage
A painter whose artistic signature consists of using symbolic characteristic compositions in refined details to create a hyper-realistic expression with the aid of graphite pencils and sociopolitical trends and movements. Kasun explores the complexity of ‘humankind with over-consumerism’ to depict ‘sensitive and controversial movements of social media influences to destroy human needs to unsatisfied and isolated personalities’.
Vimukthi Sahan
Experienced in visual arts, contoured arts, graphics, and interior designing, Vimukthi’s visual work experiments with expressive motions in blurry forms, deconstructive strokes, and unexpected motion applied to still objects. A freelance graphic and architectural artist, Vimukthi’s creative language has become more discursive in recent times and his artwork describes a radical direction to interpret the current sociocultural issues.
Vikum Bandara
An abstract expressionist, Vikum uses the total freedom of the brush over the canvas to create vibrant expressions via mixed media. His work is a dialogue between him and his canvas and tells a poetic story of hues, textures, and brush strokes. The utility of Vimukthi’s unique hues is expressive in terms of emotions that mirror freedom and unexpected beauty, which is the signature of his art.
Anupa Perera
A hyper-realistic painter with a refined eye, Anupa’s work serves as fundamental pieces that create a dialogue between art and the audience. Anupa is also a teacher who focuses on disseminating his knowledge and skills in remote areas of the country, especially to underprivileged communities in the north.