Raja Segar

He had no formal art training, and built a manner entirely his own, a figurative cubism that broke the body into planes, and later a set of experiments with refracted light. Raja Segar, a Tamil painter and sculptor born in Colombo, is among the few artists of his generation to carry the period’s Tamil experience into a modern idiom, and among the fewer still whose work has entered a major foreign museum.

He was born on 4 December 1951 in Colombo and worked without formal art training, in painting and in welded steel. His pictures of the 1970s and 80s, among them Housing Scheme of 1979 and, by a single source, The Buddha of 1987, set his formation firmly in the Late Modern decades. His work is held by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and is reported to be held by the National Art Gallery in Colombo.

He came up after the ’43 Group and before the contemporary movement of the 1990s, and his Tamil heritage gives the collection a strand of the period that is otherwise thinly recorded. He continues to work.

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Selected works

1. Housing Scheme (1979).
   • Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segar_(artist)
   • Alt: ‘Raja Segar, Housing Scheme, 1979, a figurative-cubist painting from the artist’s early period.’
2. The Buddha (1987, reported).
   • Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segar_(artist)
   • Alt: ‘Raja Segar, The Buddha, 1987, a painting from the artist’s mature period.’