Priyantha Udagedara
Super Hybrid I, 2013
Watercolour on paper, 65cm x 50cm
Provenance: Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo.
Exhibited: Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo 2015-16.
Untitled 1, 2015
Watercolour and collage on board, 31cm x 43cm
Provenance: Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo.
Exhibited: Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo 2015-16.
Priyantha Udagedara was born in Sri Lanka and the experiences of the civil and political turmoil during his youth have greatly influenced his work. "My art is a new form of landscape, one which exemplifies terror and beauty in one place. The viewer takes in a false sense of beauty before the revelation of the displaced sense of agonising beauty.” While on first view, Udagedara’s represent tropical paradise, when the viewer looks more closely, we see fragmented human body parts combined with splattered paint. This morbid juxtaposition of beauty, chaos and agony provides an altered story to the previously perceived sense of beauty (1).
Both works were created by Priyantha Udagedara as part of his Herbal Garden exhibition. Today the exotic flora and medicinal herbs found on hoardings, name boards, and other advertising material across the Sri Lankan landscape signifies of an industry growing rapidly; a commercial erotic massage industry. The Herbal Garden exhibition expresses the subject of the exploitation of the female body in an industry projected locally as both exotic and of a healing nature (2).
Other works by this artist: