Many facets of the late Anil Jayasuriya’s work on display
View(s):‘One Artist, Many Worlds’ is the exhibition of Anil Gamini Jayasuriya’s work, that opens on July 10 at the Barefoot Gallery.
Presented through the lens of family and friends, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the diversity of work Anil created during his lifetime. His keen sense of observation, ingenious explorations of media, and a ceaseless sense of curiosity are evident in the multitude of works that have been brought together for the first time in a timely celebration of Anil’s 81st birth anniversary. 
Not many are aware that working with his mother Ena de Silva, Anil was responsible for the design of the famed batik ceiling of the Bentota Beach Hotel and the large batik panels that were the cynosure of all eyes at the lobby of the Oberoi Hotel.
A portrait by Dominic Sansoni and right, Anil’s painting ‘Vel Cart’
For Anil, creating art was a means to express emotively rather than creating a style or abiding by stylistic conventions of the time. Prodigiously gifted, he was hailed by critics both here and abroad from a very early age.
A reviewer of the exhibition of Cora Abraham Art classes singled out the young artist. “Anil Gamini is Sri Lanka’s best known and most promising young painter. He is just twelve and a half years old,” wrote the reviewer pinpointing his boldly confident use of colour and patience in brushwork.
The British critic Eric Newton on seeing Anil Gamini’s work exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the UK as a 14-year-old wrote in the Manchester Guardian: “Childlike his eye and mind may be, but it is a seeing eye and an unhesitating mind. What is more there is a purely physical stamina in his painting to enable him to design on a monumental scale, to keep the whole of a canvas in his mind’s eye while he is painting a small part of it and to throw colour about on the surface like a bricklayer throws mortar.”
This exhibition presented by the Ena de Silva Foundation will be on at the Barefoot Gallery until July 27.
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