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Artist Statement:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Exhibitions:
Projects
2004 ' Given Pepper got
Ginger ' to be completed 2008.
2004 ' Candy Cousins ' works
exhibited Den Hague,Enschede
in Netherlands and Paradise
Road Galleries, Colombo, Sri
Lanka in 2003 .
2004 ' Enjoy! Enjoy ' Mural at
the Theater Zwembad de
Regents. Den Hague. The
Netherlands.
Solo Exhibitions [selected]
2008 Paradise Road
Galleries...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Paradise Road Galleries
2 Alfred House Road, Colombo3
Sri Lanka...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Sanjeewa Kumara:
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Still Lives of the Imagination
The double headed hybrid animals in strange bright colors, a human body growing out of a six legged elephant which seem to be floating in air? Or is it water? In Sanjeewa ’s world questions burn brighter than answers, riddles are not there to be solved but to be considered, revised, and slowly committed to memory.
Art is often interpreted as a confirmation of the societies that made them. But in the contemporary world where media and communication link cultures and countries at maximum speed, there may be no such thing as a single national identity. Sanjeewa calls himself a non-western western artist. The six years he has spent in Europe (he studied in The Netherlands) helped him formulate themes on overlapping cultures. He applies the theory of post-colonialism and hybridism to create his own free world, a world of fantasy and dreamlike imagery. “The theory has helped me find direction, to create my own style in painting”.
During his 15 year career as a professional artist (he has been painting since he could hold a brush) he has build up a collection of works based on these dreamlike, even toy-like fantastic creatures.
Sanjeewa Kumara says he has always been attracted to complexity and intrigued by ambiguity; without a central focus his images are real, surreal and unreal all at once. He likes his paintings to be entertaining, disorientating and confusing in equal amounts.
His work is light and intellectually undemanding, but not superficial - nor easily painted, although it appears effortless. Sanjeewa emphasizes that his images usually do not come easily - he works, reworks and struggles to distill the essence of the image from the complex arrangement of forms in his paintings, usually with 3 or 4 painting at the same time.
The simplicity of his images is deceptive; and though they are often happy, beautiful images, his paintings (or pictures as he prefers to call them) are forcing the viewer to delve into their unconscious, (both the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the uncanny are underlying themes) and go back to the formative years before the image of self became a reality (he draws from Jaques Lacan, the French Freudian psychoanalyst). “I create for the viewer to be part of my work. I invite them to read my work in a non-existing language”.
Sanjeewa ’s work breaks the traditional opposition between 'high' and 'low' art. He does not display a critical view of society but instead uses multicultural influences ( both Gauguin and Miro are present) to create his own distinctive style .This delicate ambiguity make him link magic with realism, the individual with history, the individual and regional identity and self-assertion with the magnet of the universal. His paintings can be seen as a device binding Sri Lankan culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural world.
Mieke Kooistra
April 2008
'True. It is crucial to bear in mind that Sanjeewa Kumara’s paintings reveal the radical ambiguity of fantasy. The language of his visual texts is where our desire is placed. It is not, in fact, you read his visual texts. It is like the texts themselves read back you or your desire.'
- Saman Wickramaarachchi
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