Jayantha Premachandra

He died in Paris in the spring of 1988, at fifty-three, a stroke taking him as he prepared an exhibition for UNESCO. Jayantha Premachandra had spent his last decade in France and the fuller part of his working life abroad, showing in cities from Moscow to Madrid; the recognition he won was largely a European one, and only lately, through the foundation that carries his name, has the work come home.

He was born in 1935 and trained first at the Colombo art school long known as Heywood, then took a special degree in the Soviet Union, at the arts and industry institute in Moscow, a path that suited a socially conscious Ceylonese artist of the 1950s and 60s. His hand was surest in charcoal and in portraiture, built on an expressive, humanist line; the writer and politician Sarath Amunugama remembered him as a socially conscious humanist. His subjects moved over a career from the scenes of a Sri Lankan childhood and of Soviet life towards more romantic and spiritual matter, and, in his Paris years, towards abstraction.

He worked as an illustrator at M.D. Gunasena and at the Times of Ceylon, taught art at Wesley College and Buddhist Ladies College, and served as chief designer at the Thulhiriya textile mills, before Europe drew him away. Accounts of his life credit him with more than thirty-five solo exhibitions across the former Soviet Union, West Germany, the Nordic countries, Spain, Finland, France and Sri Lanka, and name him the first Sri Lankan to hold a solo show at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad. These figures rest on the record kept by his foundation rather than on independent art history, and are best given as its account.

He belonged to none of the movements that frame Sri Lankan art. The ’43 Group was a generation older, and the contemporary artists of the 1990s came after his death; his own formation was the humanist realism of the Soviet academy, and his late turn to abstraction was a private, Paris matter. The Jayantha Premachandra Foundation has since revived the work, with a Colombo exhibition in 2022 and a retrospective in 2026, nearly four decades after he was last at an easel in his own country.

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Selected works

No individually titled works survive in public sources; the paintings are held by the Jayantha Premachandra Foundation and were shown untitled.