Arjuna Gunarathne

A single figure sits in a pensive pose, turned inward and dislocated from the room around it, painted in colour so unrestrained that the loneliness reads almost as celebration. This is the register Arjuna Gunarathne has made his own: the migrant’s in-between, set down in the ornamental grammar of the miniature. To follow how a painter arrives there, you have to trace a line that runs from a town in the Sri Lankan hills through Lahore to the suburbs of London.

He was born in 1976 in Matale, in the central hills of Sri Lanka, and trained first at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Art in Colombo between 1998 and 2002. He went on to study miniature painting at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2004, then the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in London across 2017 and 2018, and later an MFA in painting at the University of the Arts London. Each move added a language to his hand: the Mughal miniature tradition and its mural cousin, the Dutch masters, the icon painting of the Gothic period, the drawing discipline of the British school. He learned to hold them together rather than choose between them.

What he chose to paint with that inheritance was the experience of leaving. Settled in London, he took the migrant communities of its suburbs as his subject, and the paintings turn on belonging, loneliness and the quiet arithmetic of community: solitary characters in reflective poses, passages of botanical detail and landscape, an ecological unease running beneath the surface. The flattened, decorative logic of the miniature gives the work of displacement a strange composure, so that the East he carries and the West he lives in meet on a single plane rather than argue across it. The colour, which might read as festivity, is doing something closer to consolation.

That meeting has travelled. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Colombo in 2023, at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2018, and at the India Art Fair and with Akara Art in Mumbai in 2024; it hung at Christie’s in London for the coronation of King Charles III in 2023, and entered the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and the Royal Art Collection in the United Kingdom. Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo represents him, and he continues to exhibit with it.

For all the distance the paintings have covered, they keep returning to the same quiet figure, alone in a bright room: a man from the Matale hills setting down what it is to belong to two places at once and be wholly at home in neither.