Tilak Samarawickrema

An architect’s rapidograph, the fine technical pen made for ruling straight edges and dimensioning plans, is an unlikely place for an art to begin, yet the idle marks Tilak Samarawickrema set down with his in the drawing offices of the late 1960s kept turning away from the straight, gathering into loops and swells that read less like measured drawing than like the contours of the Sinhala alphabet. He followed that curve for the rest of a working life, carrying it across ink drawings, etchings, an animated film made in Rome, tapestries woven in a Kandyan hill village, and, latterly, sculptures drawn in space out of brass wire, so that a single sinuous stroke became the through-thread of a career that ran from Colombo to Milan, Rome and New York and home again.

He was born in 1943 and grew up in Colombo 05, the son of a civil engineer whose technical bent he claimed to have inherited, and he came to art by way of architecture rather than the easel. At the School of Architecture at Katubedda, the campus that would become the University of Moratuwa, a collage he built from cut-out lettering struck a teacher as an echo of Picasso’s Cubist years and was marked accordingly; by his own account there was no looking back from that morning. He read Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art as his manual for the island’s crafts and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture for the modern discipline, and, in the years he records apprenticing in Geoffrey Bawa’s Colombo studio, he moved among the makers then reworking a regional idiom: Barbara Sansoni, Laki Senanayake, Ena de Silva, the craftsman Edwin Perera. The line that would become his subject was born of the office routine: at the State Engineering Corporation, where pre-stressed concrete was the business of the day, his rapidograph doodles loosened from architectural rigour and began to resemble writing.

Italy gave that instinct its freedom. A postgraduate scholarship from the Italian government took him abroad in 1971 for what became roughly twelve formative years, first to study urban design in Milan and then to a studio and a home at 80 Via Urbana, in the old working-class Suburra quarter of Rome. Milan was the design capital, and its circuit received him quickly: the designer Bruno Munari, taken with the drawings, championed the work, and the magazines that set the terms of the discipline, Domus, Abitare and Interni among them, carried his line. He looked hard at the modern masters he could now see at first hand, from Picasso and de Chirico to Rothko and Warhol, and at Italian cinema, Fellini above all, and the drawings grew more sensual and more abstract while keeping an architect’s balance of mark and empty space.

Midway through the Italian years came the most ambitious undertaking of the decade, and it was a film. He had wanted to give his drawing a dimension in time, and from 1974 he worked toward it in animation, finishing in 1977 for the Roman studio Corona Cinematografica. Àndarè of Sri Lanka was the work in which his still line was at last set moving: a hand-drawn animation of some twenty minutes that retold the folk tale of Andare, the court jester of Kandy, its figures built almost entirely from the curved signs of the Sinhala alphabet and set down frame by frame, so that the script itself appeared to walk and dance across the screen; its soundtrack was recorded at home and later pressed as a record of Sinhalese folk melodies. Entered as Italy’s national film, it screened at the Oberhausen short-film festival in West Germany, in 1977 or 1978 by differing accounts, and drew a special award from the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Alongside the animation he learned the older disciplines of the print, training in stone etching and lithography at Urbino and mastering copper-plate etching at Giorgio Upiglio’s Milan atelier, and in 1981 he gathered the Andare drawings into a limited book carrying an original etching, with an introduction and preface by Munari and the critic Pierre Restany.

The work travelled while he did. He showed his drawings and prints in Milan and, by the reviews reprinted from the period, at the Galleria L’Obelisco in Rome, the historic house founded by Irene Brin and Gaspero Del Corso, whose 1977 catalogue carried an essay by Munari; the contemporary Italian press recorded a solo showing there and a place at the Quadriennale of Rome, and Ceylon reportage placed his work at the São Paulo Biennial in 1973. New York followed at the end of the decade, where a fortnight’s exhibition at the Rizzoli gallery on Fifth Avenue in 1979 set his prints before the American design world, and a commission from the United Nations population fund carried his poster and a portfolio of prints back to a conference in Colombo.

Home again in the 1980s, he turned the line toward craft and design, and it is here that his second life as a maker took shape. As a consultant to Sri Lanka’s National Design Centre he set about modernising an indigenous tradition, and from the late 1980s he gave his geometric compositions to the cotton handloom of the weavers of Talagune in Uda Dumbara, an old Kandyan weaving village, producing boldly coloured abstract tapestries that held the weavers’ craft to a new precision of shape and shade. The tapestries reached a wide audience, sold for some years through the design store of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shown in solo exhibitions abroad, among them the Deutsches Textilmuseum at Krefeld in 1995 and the design museum at Oslo in 1998; the turn set the weavers’ handloom to a spare geometric abstraction, the architect’s discipline that had ordered his drawings now carried into cloth. His minimalist architecture and interiors ran in parallel, published in the same Italian design journals that had first taken up his drawings.

The curved line returned to three dimensions late in his career. From 2009 he began to make the sculptures he said he had always wanted, bending brass and binding wire into life-size figures that are, in effect, his ink drawings lifted off the page and set in space, their shadows thrown on the wall a working part of the piece. A fifty-year retrospective filled the Lionel Wendt gallery in Colombo in 2016, and in 2025 a six-decade retrospective in Colombo gathered the 1973 drawings, the copper-plate etchings, the tapestries, the new brass-wire figures and the film together, under the title Rekha, the word for line. Into his eighties he described himself as all but retired, taking each day as it came.

To read his work is to watch a single formal idea worked through every material he touched. Munari, writing in 1977, saw the point plainly: the drawings are governed by the curved stroke over the straight, a hand-made, almost non-Euclidean geometry closer to the loops of Sinhala script than to the compass, a dynamic mark that runs across the sheet and leaves the eye to complete the figure it only half sets down. The art historian Sinha Raja Tammita-Delgoda traced that contour to the vakadeka, the doubled curve that has run through Sinhala ornament for close to two thousand years, and found that in Tilak’s hands the line takes on life. The full-bodied, round-cheeked figures that recur from the drawings to the woven tapestries carry that same alphabetic curve from mark into image and, at the last, into wire. His standing sits a little apart from the painters’ canon of twentieth-century Sri Lankan art, for his medium was the drawn and woven contour rather than the painted surface, and he is better placed among the independent modernists and the Bawa-circle designers of the decades after the ’43 Group, the makers who kept the island’s art moving between the Group’s last years and the contemporary generation. Across drawing, film, tapestry and sculpture, his achievement was to take one indigenous line and prove how far it could travel.

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Sources

1. Samarawickrema, Tilak. Ink of Lanka. 2009.
2. Munari, Bruno. Essay in the Galleria L’Obelisco exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1977.
3. Goonetileke, Ian. Essay in the UNESCO National Commission exhibition catalogue, 1982.
4. Trombadori, D. Review. l’Unità (Rome), 3 January 1978.
5. Deen, T.M. Review. Ceylon Daily News, 1979.
6. Sunday Times (Sri Lanka). ‘Tribute to Tilak and His Inimitable Lines.’ 25 May 2025. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/250525/plus/tribute-to-tilak-and-his-inimitable-lines-599191.html
7. Sunday Times (Sri Lanka). ‘Lines That Take on a Life and Rhythm of Their Own.’ 18 September 2016. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/160918/plus/lines-that-take-on-a-life-and-rhythm-of-their-own-208595.html
8. Smithsonian Libraries catalogue record. Tilak Samarawickrema: modern woven art from Sri Lanka. Deutsches Textilmuseum, Krefeld (25 June to 20 August 1995). https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_517830
9. Samarawickrema, Tilak. ‘Artist Profile’ (self-reported CV). http://www.tilaksamarawickrema.com/Profile.html
10. RoGallery. Rizzoli Gallery exhibition poster by ‘Tilak’ (1979). https://www.rogallery.com/artists/tilak/rizzoli-gallery/