Dream and reality blend into one canvas

A Sujeewa Kumari painting trapezes tactfully between the real and the imagined. In her latest exhibition titled Full Bloom on at Paradise Road Galleries until March 24, the artist seems to resolve two states that are easily dichotomised: the dream state and ‘reality’.

In ‘Full Bloom,’ Sujeewa Kumari dissolves the boundaries between the figures she depicts without the need for different tools. Instead, she creates constantly metamorphosing figures that slink between their varied existences with ease.

The artist continues stories begun in previous works by taking portraits of South Asian women as depicted in antique colonial photographs; themselves monochrome, now set against

kaleidoscopes of colour that borrow from the surrealist tradition, even extending it to touch on contexts previously excluded from the canon.