H.A. Karunaratne

Sri Lankan painting stayed largely figurative into the 1960s, a matter of faces, landscapes and gods set down plainly. The picture that broke with that, the canvas with no subject in it at all, arrived through a man who had gone to New York to learn how it was made. H.A. Karunaratne is called the father of abstract art in Sri Lanka, and the abstraction he practised was not lifted whole from America; it was bent to a Buddhist reading of impermanence, so that the fields and drifts of paint carried an idea of change and decay.

He was born in 1929 and trained at the Government College of Fine Arts in Colombo, the school then called Heywood, graduating in 1958 under teachers who are themselves part of this story: David Paynter, Stanley Abeysinghe and J.D.A. Perera. Two journeys abroad shaped what followed. A Japanese government scholarship took him to the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music around 1961, the start of many years he would study and live in Japan, and a Fulbright award carried him to the Pratt Institute in New York in 1966, where he took up graphic art and met the abstraction of the New York School at its source.

Back in Colombo he became the figure through whom non-figurative art entered the Sri Lankan mainstream. He institutionalised the abstract and non-figurative tradition on the island, and was the first Sri Lankan artist to build a full discourse on abstract art, on its methods and its ideas. From the mid-1970s he lectured in painting at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Kelaniya, then one of the island’s few degree-level art schools, and turned its students from the figure towards abstraction and experimental material, from fabric to metal; his maxim to them held that one should not paint the picture but let the picture paint itself. His own work ranged across painting, sculpture and mixed media, intuitive in method and, as one account has it, grounded in Buddhist and Zen thought. He treated painting itself as a Buddhist method, a kind of meditation, and titled a thinly painted late series ‘Nirvana’.

Recognition ran across two countries. Sri Lanka gave him the title of Kala Suri, and Japan the Order of the Rising Sun. Late in a long life the work was gathered anew: a retrospective at Theertha’s Red Dot Gallery accompanied a book on him by Anoli Perera, and the Paradise Road Saskia Fernando Gallery took him to the India Art Fair in 2025 and gave him a solo presentation at Frieze Masters in London in 2026. Its Legacies exhibition placed him beside Lionel Wendt, George Keyt and Richard Gabriel as one of the country’s modern pioneers. Sources give his death in 2026.

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Selected works

1. Water for Life (2000), oil on canvas, 140 x 100 cm · exhibited ‘Water of Life’, Paradise Road Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, 2025.
   • Source: https://www.saskiafernandogallery.com/exhibitions/145-water-of-life-h.-a.-karunaratne/
   • Alt: ‘H.A. Karunaratne, Water for Life, 2000, a large abstract oil painting shown in his 2025 exhibition Water of Life.’
2. Untitled (2019), mixed media on board, 88 x 102 cm.
   • Source: https://www.abirpothi.com/prsfg-brings-h-a-karunaratne-the-father-of-abstract-art-in-sri-lanka-to-india-art-fair-2025/
   • Alt: ‘H.A. Karunaratne, Untitled, 2019, an abstract mixed-media work on board.’