Gunasiri Kolambage

For most of a long career he was, by day, the art director of an advertising firm, and by his own discipline a painter of watercolour, portrait and nature. Gunasiri Kolambage belonged to the generation that carried Sri Lankan painting through the decades after independence, and to the particular Colombo tradition of the artist who earned his living in the studios of the advertising trade.

He graduated from the Government College of Fine Arts in 1959, and studied watercolour under G.S. Fernando and Susil Premaratne until 1961. From 1959 he worked at J. Walter Thompson, rising to chief artist and then art director, the commercial studio serving as the day work behind the private painting. His subjects ran from landscape and nature to portraiture, over a career of more than fifty years, and he was honoured with the title of Kala Booshana in 2016.

His training at the end of the 1950s and his working life through the decades that followed set him among the Late Modern painters, the generation after the ’43 Group and before the contemporary movement of the 1990s. He died in 2024.

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Selected works

A representative painting or ceramic work is to be supplied.