Covert, a 2 meter high welded iron metal column installed at Palazzo Mora, European Cultural Academy Venice during the 59th Venice Biennale

Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s works are public diaries: memorialisations of history, wrought in wire or brass, aluminum or stone. Through repetition and ritual, Thenuwara allows the political milieu of the year to shift what each motif signifies.

Artist, activist, curator and educator, Chandraguptha Thenuwara (b. 1960, Sri Lanka) is a luminary amongst contemporary Sri Lankan artists. His wider body of work includes sculpture, painting, drawings, public monuments, lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects, all of which are informed directly by his activism. Every year since 1997, Chandraguptha Thenuwara has presented an exhibition of works to commemorate “Black July,” a series of Anti-Tamil pogroms that erupted in Sri Lanka in July of 1983 and led to mass death and destruction.

Electric Chair For Sale, 2015

Beautification 2021 - commissioned by the Lunuganga Trust as part of The Gift, a centenary celebration of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa

Thenuwara sees state-sponsored violence as only morphing from this initial episode and illustrates this transfiguration through his annual exhibitions; each of them the careful product of the political climate in which they are created, each of them an extension of a motif-specific series. In the first iteration of his annual show Barrelism in 1997, Thenuwara foregrounded the tar barrel as a symbol of the militarization of public space. Two decades later, Thenuwara returned to the barrel in Neo-Barrelism, an exploration of how these symbols of militarization had melded into the background. Thenuwara’s work, reaching as far back as the 1990s, reverberates vigorously today as in its form and style, his work is crisp and timeless. His works are public diaries: memorialisations of history, wrought in wire or brass, aluminum or stone. Through repetition and ritual, Thenuwara allows the political milieu of the year to shift what each motif signifies.

Meta Physique, 2015

Post Neo Barrelism, 2022 / Glitch:Camouflage, 2022

Ecce Homo, 2022, Oil on Canvas

Thenuwara leaps across mediums, carving his repository of leitmotifs out of line drawings, bronze and wire sculptures, readymade installations, and canvas works: the lotus, the barricade, the stupa, the barrel, the “glitch,” or the soldier all appear, linked intimately, snaking in and out of each other in intricate vortices.

In 1993, after receiving his Master of Fine Arts from the Moscow State Institute in the USSR, Thenuwara founded the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA), an artist-run school dedicated to fostering the still-fledgling Sri Lankan contemporary art scene.

Chandraguptha Thenuwara's works currently belong to institutional collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia. Thenuwara’s work was featured in Cities on the Move, an exhibition in Vienna organized by visionary curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. In 2022, Thenuwara presented a sculptural installation in Personal Structures, European Cultural Centre, a collateral exhibition of the 59th Biennale de Venezia.