Before Barrelism: Tracing the Making of an Artist

Walking into Before Barrelism Tracing the Origins of a Practice feels less like entering an exhibition and more like stepping into an artist’s private archive one that was never meant to be public. Mounted quietly on the gallery wall, the works reveal a Chandraguptha Thenuwara that most audiences have not seen: not the politically incisive artist synonymous with Barrelism but a young student searching, studying, doubting and slowly finding a language of his own.

Curated as a post-retirement tribute by the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, the exhibition foregrounds Thenuwara’s early academic years, particularly his formative period in Russia. As the curatorial note explains, this is not an exhibition about rupture but continuity about how disciplined academic training, careful observation and intellectual seriousness laid the groundwork for the critical visual practice that would later define Sri Lankan contemporary art. In conversation, Thenuwara himself describes this exhibition simply as a chance for the world to see “where I came from and where I am.”

The discipline of learning and the courage to show it

What immediately stands out in Before Barrelism is the artist’s willingness to reveal work that he openly describes as “amateurish.” These are not polished masterpieces; they are studies – first and second year works completed during his academic training, primarily between 1986 and 1987. Thenuwara spent nearly a decade in Russia, seven years continuously in formal academic study and several more years returning on and off. These works, he explains, belong to the earliest phase of that journey.

There are class portraits, compulsory still life compositions and figure studies some accepted and others rejected by institutions at the time. One painting, submitted to a national exhibition in the late 1980s, was rejected outright. “It’s good that they rejected it,” Thenuwara reflects. That rejection marked a turning point; from then on he stopped producing work for competitions and began working for himself. In hindsight, this moment feels quietly radical a refusal to tailor artistic practice to institutional validation.

What makes this exhibition significant is that these works were never meant to be seen. They belonged to Thenuwara’s personal collection, kept away for decades. Showing them now, he says, allows students and young artists to witness the process of learning itself; improvement through repetition, discipline and failure. The exhibition becomes pedagogical not in instruction but in honesty.

Portraits, identity and the self under construction

The portraits on display of classmates, friends and the artist himself form a central thread in the exhibition. Thenuwara speaks of two kinds of portraits, those done in class bound by academic structure and others that allow freer expression. Together, they chart a visible progression from controlled realism to moments where abstraction begins to surface.

A self-portrait stands among them, not as a declaration of identity but as an inquiry into it. Elsewhere, portraits of Lester, Tamara, Sulekha and Sunethra become sites of relationship, perception and misperception. Thenuwara reflects on how people often disagree with their own representations, how self-image rarely aligns with how others see us. In that sense, portraiture here is less about likeness and more about tension between inner life and outward form.

This concern with identity deepens in later works where figures appear in groups of three, often women, sometimes pregnant. These triadic compositions recur across Thenuwara’s practice. One figure may be attentive, another distracted, a third engaged in action. He likens it to musicians having a single portrait while artists require three figures suggesting that artistic identity is inherently fragmented, dialogic and unsettled.

These images, although rooted in academic study, quietly foreshadow the political artist to come. Even when not overtly political, they are deeply attentive to human vulnerability, social roles and emotional states.

Pain, politics and the birth of a visual language

As the exhibition progresses, the works begin to absorb the historical weight of the late 1980s. Though framed as studies, several compositions unmistakably echo Sri Lanka’s period of unrest – strikes, protests, disappearances and fear. One painting, influenced by socialist realism, depicts collective struggle with compositional precision rather than explicit symbolism. It was, as Thenuwara explains, a study in how to make political work “very artistically.”

Another deeply affecting work references the mothers of the disappeared. A grieving mother holding her dead son recalls the Pietà, transforming a classical Christian motif into a local image of loss. These are not sensational works; they are restrained, quiet and devastating in their simplicity.

The exhibition also includes conceptual drawings and experimental works from the early 1990s when Thenuwara returned to Sri Lanka and began forming an alternative art school. One series, produced using an old typewriter, is described as an early form of glitch long before the term entered contemporary discourse. Here, the artist is visibly struggling between classical realism and abstraction, between structure and rupture, searching for a language that could hold both personal and political truths.

A standout work titled Mirror Wall evokes Sigiriya’s historic surface but reimagined through protest graffiti, abandoned buckets and the absence left by arrest and disappearance. Like the ancient mirror wall, it records voices but these are voices interrupted, erased, unfinished.

Continuity not beginning

Before Barrelism ultimately resists the temptation to mythologize origins. Instead, it insists on continuity. As the curatorial note argues, Barrelism did not emerge suddenly in 1997; it evolved from years of disciplined academic training, ethical seriousness and sustained inquiry. The grids, studies and preliminary sketches displayed here are not lesser works they are foundations.

Thenuwara himself is clear: this exhibition is not authored by him but offered by the university as a tribute to a lifetime of teaching, making and thinking. Yet its impact lies precisely in how personal it feels. By exposing uncertainty, rejection and struggle, the exhibition reframes artistic success as something built slowly, often invisibly.

In asking viewers to look closely, think historically and understand process, Before Barrelism does more than trace an origin. It reminds us that political art does not begin with slogans or symbols; it begins with learning how to see.

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