Tilake Abeysinghe

A Ceylonese student walks into a Milan studio in the 1960s to learn sculpture from a teacher his sources record as Marini, and carries the lesson back to the walls of Colombo. Tilake Abeysinghe trained twice over, at home and in Italy, and worked at a scale few of his contemporaries attempted, in paint, in bronze and relief, and above all in the large public mural.

He was born in 1929 and studied at the Colombo school then called Heywood before going on to Italy, where he learned painting under Domenico Cantatore and sculpture under Marini. His first solo exhibition opened in Sri Lanka in 1967, some years after his work had appeared in a group show in Milan in 1962. Through the 1970s and 80s he made a series of monumental works for public buildings in Colombo, among them an eighty-five-foot mural for Standard Chartered, a bas-relief for American Express, and a monument for the Central Bank.

His standing at home was marked with the title of Kalakirthi, and Italy, where he had trained, made him a Cavaliere in 1984. He worked across the whole of the post-’43 decades, neither a member of the founding Group nor a figure of the contemporary movement that followed, but one of the substantial independent modernists who kept Sri Lankan art moving in the years between. He died in 2022.

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Selected works

Images of the murals are to be supplied; the works listed are documented public commissions.

1. Mural, Standard Chartered Bank, Colombo (c.1970s–80s), approximately 85 feet.
   • Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilake_Abeysinghe
   • Alt: ‘Tilake Abeysinghe, the large mural made for Standard Chartered Bank in Colombo, one of his monumental public works.’
2. Monument, Central Bank of Ceylon, Colombo.
   • Source: https://art.taprobanecollection.com/tilake-abeysinghe-1929-2022/
   • Alt: ‘Tilake Abeysinghe, the monument made for the Central Bank in Colombo.’