Vajira Gunawardena (born 1971) is a Sri Lankan award‑winning painter who received his BFA degree from the State Art School in Colombo.

He is an internationally recognized artist and has participated in numerous international artist camps and symposiums. He has held many solo and group exhibitions in India, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Cuba, the United Nations Office in Geneva, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the 798 Art Zone in Beijing (China), Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Tanzania, both locally and internationally. His works are included in many private and corporate collections worldwide.

Vajira’s paintings have a sociological mix of sensuous human emotions and autobiographical and critical qualities. The artist’s artwork effectively merges elements of cubism and pop art with primitive figurative expression, capturing the dynamic essence of movement and the vivacious spirit of daily life. Through the use of rough shapes and vibrant color contrasts, the artwork conveys the relentless energy that drives progress, inviting a thoughtful engagement between new forms and abstraction. There are many styles and allusions at play in any given painting. He creates large-format figurative semi-abstract paintings. The artist's paintings are expressive, according to some, within the outsider art movement.

His works address issues and questions about culture and identity and explore human imperfections or unseen aspects of humanity. Human discourse has collapsed in the market and digital society globally. The paintings are considered an evolving relationship between the human body and technology, desire, and the ways that digital devices and human forms have fundamentally altered our everyday existence in the world. He has followed characters of living people in a contemporary material culture to be considered as symbolizing human emotions. His works on images and symbols promote diversity, deconstruction, and the fractioning of subconscious memories.

Vajira was purposed to create a multi-dimensional work treating both narrative and form as one. He considered a survey of a new language of art; interest in bright colors, rhythmic patterning, expressive figurative imagery, and developments in experimental techniques combined to offer a new visual format that seeks to communicate a fully expressionistic borderless painting.

Time at the Three Little Birds Art Studio Residency

Residency Period September 2026