Karunasiri Wijesinghe

Karunasiri Wijesinghe was born in Makadura, Sri Lanka. He graduated with the degree Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya (1982). He teaches as Visiting Lecturer at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA), Colombo and the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo.

Wijesinghe’s artistic practice belongs to a great line drawing tradition deeply moored in the nature and ecology of Sri Lanka. The main body of his work has been described as a profound cultural response to one salient theme – Nature. His artistic endeavours represent an aesthetic and spiritual exploration of Sri Lanka’s natural environment, mainly its trees and waterways. In Wijesinghe’s paintings, a tree is a tree but it is also much more. It reveals an inner dynamic of these denizens, in a way that a photograph can never achieve. He achieves this by capturing the unerring rhythm in the sculpture of a tree through a process of selection and isolation. He has preserved for us shards of a broken mirror which links us to a past which exists only as instinct. Perhaps the villager, who inhabits each tree with a goddess – ruksha devata – and lights a lamp in a cavity of its trunk at nightfall, is closer to that lost world still, than us. ‘Karu’s paintings are to me such an act of worship and tribute to our ecological memory’ (Dr Tissa Abeysekera). For Tonight No Poetry Will Serve Wijesinghe brings our attention to the majesty of fallen trees that are strewn in the jungles like fallen beings. The roots here appear to have as much to do with the life cycle of trees and time as they also signal an end that attests the loss of indigenous tree species and rampant deforestation.

Wijesinghe’s favourite solo and group exhibitions include Krinzingep Projekte, Vienna (2013-14), One World Foundation, Ahungalle (2013), Vapi (2011), Drawing exhibition, Lionel Wendt (2007), Tree of Life, Deutsche Bank, Köln (2004). While Wijesinghe has devoted much of his work to drawing, and painting; he is distinguished for his original book covers and illustrations. His commissioned works are retained in the collections of several leading banks and corporate establishments in the country.

Karunasiri Wijesinghe lives and works in Colombo, Sri Lanka.