Jagath Weerasinghe

In the morning his hands might steady a fading temple mural, easing centuries of loss back from a painted surface; by afternoon those same hands lay down raw, worked-over canvases about the violence of the present. Jagath Weerasinghe has spent his life inside that apparent contradiction, one vocation given to the island’s ancient painting and the other to its wounds, and the two are closer than they look: each is an act of holding on to what a country stands to lose. That single instinct, attending to a wound rather than smoothing it over, runs through everything he has made.

He was born in Moratuwa in 1954 and trained first as a painter, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours in painting at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya, in 1981. His path then split. He studied the conservation of wall paintings at ICCROM in Rome in 1985 and the conservation of rock art at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles in 1988, before turning back to art to complete a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the American University in Washington in 1991. Today he directs the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya, a rare figure who moves with authority between the ancient record and the contemporary studio.

The wound he attends most closely is his country’s own. As the civil war ground on, his peer group was making politically conscious, postmodern work that had no name, and Jagath gave it one: the ’90s Trend, a framing that turned a loose tendency into a movement and set off the theoretical inquiry it needed. He stood at the centre of the revitalisation of Sri Lankan art in that decade, the so-called art explosion, which his landmark exhibition ‘Anxiety’ (Kansava) of 1992 had announced. His own paintings answer the same period from the inside, expressive and neo-expressionist in temper and reaching into installation and performance, taking political violence, trauma and displacement as their subject and refusing the consolation of a settled surface. His manner joins the gestures of action painting to a post-modern narrative, and a bleeding heart recurs at the centre of the picture; the palette he works in stays deliberately spare, owing in part to his years conserving the murals at Dambulla and Sigiriya. In 2000 he carried that conviction into an institution, co-founding the Theertha International Artists’ Collective and serving as its chairman until 2017, building the body that has since held much of this generation together.

The record abroad is substantial and specific. He is represented by Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, where he showed ‘Belief: The Promise of Absence’ in 2018, and he has exhibited with Aicon Contemporary in New York, including the survey ‘Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’. He held ‘Decorated’ at Breese Little in London in 2014 and ‘Dream for Me’ at KHOJ in Delhi in 2018, and his work has featured in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka’s landmark survey ‘One Hundred Thousand Small Tales’. Across the Colombo Art Biennale he has been a central presence, one of the artists by whom the country’s contemporary scene came to be measured.

Return to the two sets of work on the two tables, the temple surface and the raw canvas. A wound on a wall and a wound in a nation’s memory ask the same thing of him, patience rather than erasure, and he has given decades to both. The art of Sri Lanka’s last thirty years is hard to describe without him.