Fareed Uduman

A son opens his late father’s rooms and finds the canvases stacked and unsigned, none of them titled, none dated, painted for no eye but the painter’s own. Fareed Uduman showed his work once in his lifetime and let the rest accumulate in private, so that a man now counted among Sri Lanka’s most original modern painters was, while he lived, known to almost no one. To see how a body of work this singular stayed hidden so long, you have to begin with the two lives he kept apart.

He was born in 1917. By day he worked as a Hansard reporter, taking down the words of parliament, and he held to the politics of the left, a supporter of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. Painting was the life he kept for himself. He worked in oil on hardboard, plywood, or whatever material came to hand, drew the cartoons of a political man, and wrote poems. He signed almost nothing and named almost nothing, which is why the work reached the public only later, retrieved, restored and titled by his son Jomo Uduman.

His subjects were earthy and direct: carters and their bulls, fisherfolk, working women, animals, and the plainly erotic, treated without apology. The art historian Senake Bandaranayake, who set him beside the ’43 Group masters rather than among them, called the work ‘highly original, sometimes startling and consistently distinctive’. The writer Ellen Dissanayake reached further back and called him a mute, inglorious Milton, a gift that went largely unheard in its own time. He belonged to no group and studied under no master that the record names; the modernism he arrived at was his own.

Recognition came after 1985, the year he died. His first posthumous exhibition opened at Gallery 706 in Colombo in 1993, and in January 2012 some forty of his paintings were shown at the Lionel Wendt. In December 2022 a permanent home for the whole collection, the Sky Gallery of the Fareed Uduman ArtForum, opened on Kirula Road in Colombo. His son had by then done for the father what the father never did for himself, and gathered the scattered, unsigned work into one place.

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Selected works

The paintings were originally unsigned, undated and untitled; the titles below were given later by his son, and the works are held in the family collection at the Fareed Uduman ArtForum.

1. Cart Bull, oil on board · Fareed Uduman ArtForum, Colombo.
   • Source: https://www.sundaytimes.lk/120101/Plus/plus_07.html
   • Alt: ‘Fareed Uduman, Cart Bull, an oil painting of a bull at a cart, from the artist’s private body of work.’
2. Woman in Flight · Fareed Uduman ArtForum, Colombo.
   • Source: https://island.lk/startlingly-beautiful-pieces-of-life-and-soul/
   • Alt: ‘Fareed Uduman, Woman in Flight, a figure painting from the artist’s private body of work.’
3. Mating Elephants · Fareed Uduman ArtForum, Colombo.
   • Source: https://island.lk/startlingly-beautiful-pieces-of-life-and-soul/
   • Alt: ‘Fareed Uduman, Mating Elephants, an animal painting from the artist’s private body of work.’