‘Artpreneurship’ : A new way to look at artistic contributions
The magical old woodcut from Bangladesh is in sepia- showing a mandala peopled thickly with a bestiary which includes flying two-headed tigers, long snouted fish and birds. This ancient monochrome print hangs in a room next to a series of frames in stark modern white, which feature cartoons making no sense till you hold up your cellphone with an app to them- which then literally spring to life, and tell a story in augmented reality.
Gallery Four Life in Colombo 5 is a carefully curated place with a nook and cranny for everyone’s notion of art. It is an eclectic answer to the rarefied and expensive high end galleries, says Chathuranga Biyagama, managing director.
Chathuranga is a self-taught artist who held a senior position in banking. In 2014, he was in Taiwan where he was recognized as one of the world’s 60 best artists. In Taiwan Chathuranga was first exposed to the jet set artists who ‘drive Porsches and Ferraris’- like Sir Alfred J. DiMora- and realized that art could more than pay the bills. “Artists also hold immense civic power in those countries,”
says Chathuranga.
In 2017 he gave up a lucrative job in banking for the love of art and early this year opened Four Life. The gallery pitches into ‘artpreneurship’- a way of pumping art and creative-based income into our economic system. It is no coincidence that Chathuranga’s idols- apart from Picasso- are Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor- the two highest earning artists in the world.
The ‘four lives’ of this gallery are well-defined. It hosts exhibitions; develops art; has an e commerce platform to sell Sri Lankan art; and has an art studio cum library.
While the ground floor exhibits are for sale and can be rented out for exhibitions- the upper storey is for featured exhibitions which run for 21 years.
Chathuranga at this point is interested in art projects which discuss social issues. The destruction of Wilpattu touched him enough to do a few pieces using dead leaves from the forest- but so did the fate of King Ravana he felt was a duty to restore the pristine image of the hero through a series called The Story of the Fallen.
Another service taken up by Chathuranga is to give a much wanted platform for young undergraduates and graduates especially of the University of Visual and Performance Arts, featuring their work readily in the gallery as well as in Aartzy.lk, an online platform with a partner where Sri Lankan art is sold- mostly to US, European and Latin American markets.
The studio and library upstairs supports university students coming from outstations free of charge. “It’s all a win-win relationship” says Chathuranga.
Currently Four Life has hosted Bangladeshi artists, and work their way through Asia, and then hopefully Europe. Bangladesh, says Chathuranga, has an art milieu that is much more dynamic and popular than ours.
Curation itself is a science with its standards down to the spotlight gaps, and it is something Four Life is now propagating here.
Despite running the gallery with a very small team, Chathuranga still finds time to paint. What absorbs him now is a form of single stroke art where he quite adroitly creates a painting with one dash on a canvas strewn with paint. A piece that takes half an hour fetches as much as 200 Dollars.
He exhibits too every year in Tokyo, UK, Amsterdam and Dubai. Four Life was the first Sri Lankan gallery to go to Amsterdam.
For Chathuranga, the most abidingly fascinating landscape is the unchartered one of Sri Lankan art. His mission is to map it out and reach its backwoods. With his daring new gallery the artist is riding a new wave- to give Sri Lankan art its place above the mantelpiece, and help budding and often vulnerable talent see the limelight.