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Lot Essay
Sri Lankan artist, Ivan Peries, was a founder member of the 43 Group along with George Keyt, George Claessen, Richard Gabriel, Aubrey Collette, and Manjusri Thero. Their 1943 manifesto sought to marry Western Modernism with indigenous contexts - ideals later adopted by India's Progressive Artists' Group in 1947. Peries' evocations of the coastal fishing villages and landscapes from his native country reached a high point of development between the mid-1950s and 1960s. His paintings are remarkable for their structural precision, yet they still retain an overall luminous quality.
Peries spent most of his career in London, studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949, before he returned to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. However, "In spite of having spent a major part of his life as a painter abroad, there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling [...] it is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland." (S. Bandaranayake quoted in, N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 117)
Peries spent most of his career in London, studying at the Anglo-French Institute at St. Johns Wood School of Art from 1946 until 1949, before he returned to London to live in Southend-on-Sea in 1953. However, "In spite of having spent a major part of his life as a painter abroad, there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling [...] it is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland." (S. Bandaranayake quoted in, N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 117)