Artists

Contemporary

The island's art in the present tense: living artists, working through what a country carries after a long war, and deciding what its art becomes next. Much of it came up through the war years and after, unafraid of politics and open to every medium, alongside senior figures who kept to their own road.

The Theertha Collective

The artists who formed the Theertha Collective in Colombo in 2000, and carried the movement known as the '90s Trend: the politically charged, experimental art, in performance and installation as much as in paint, that rose through the country's civil-war years.

The Vibhavi Academy

The artists formed at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts, the independent Colombo art school Chandraguptha Thenuwara founded in 1993, which trained and taught much of the island's politically engaged art in the decades that followed.

The present day

The artists working now, alongside and after the movement: senior figures who kept to their own path, and a younger generation taking the work into new ground.

All artists