The Southern Hell | Sunday Observer

The Southern Hell

16 February, 2020

An exhibition by Anura Krishantha curated by Jagath Weerasinghe at Theertha Red Dot Gallery.

The exhibition remains open untill February 29, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Sundays and public holidays.

The Southern Hell is Anura Krishantha’s fourth solo exhibition. His works are kitsch - somewhat gaudy, and there is a certain amount of ineptness in his works, that adds a raw edge - an unrefined-ness to the paintings. The kitsch and the rawness make his work calculatedly aloof to gentrified and exquisitely crafted surfaces and subtleties of a particular kind of post modern art that succumb to the prevailing forms of commodity production.

The thematic for his current works comes from hell scenes painted at the bottom register of murals in late 19th and early 20th-century Buddhist temples along the Southern coastal belt of the island. Krishantha, a trained murals conservator has been working on these murals for several years. The Hells in his paintings, though they share a lot in common with those in the temples, are also different in a significant way. 

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