George Keyt

Acquired from Sita de Silva on behalf of the artist, Colombo, 1991

Sita de Silva (1935 - 2018) served as the founding Secretary of the George Keyt Foundation from its establishment in June 1988. Together with her husband Cedric, the Foundation’s founding Chairman, she helped launch and manage major annual programmes such as the Kala Pola art fair, the Young Contemporaries exhibition and numerous other events that provided vital exposure for Sri Lankan artists. Visionaries in their own right, the de Silvas worked tirelessly to promote and preserve the legacy of their friend George Keyt, and are widely remembered for their enduring contribution to the development of modern and contemporary Sri Lankan art.

Untitled (Woman) stands as a testament to Keyt’s lifelong engagement with the female form, imbued with sensuality, symbolism and stylistic abstraction.

In the present lot, the woman appears at once mythic and intimate, her frontal nudity, striking profile and languid gestures recalling both South Asian classical sculpture and the pared-down monumentality of Picasso’s figures from the 1930s, whom Keyt admired. The composition is framed with deliberate flatness: ornamental drapery, geometric vessels and a stylised window collapse into interlocking planes. Yet the earthy palette of ochres, siennas and aubergines grounds the figure within Keyt’s distinctive visual language.

Keyt’s affinity for poetic narrative permeates the canvas. The unnamed sitter assumes the grace of a divine consort or heroine, perhaps inspired by the Sanskrit epics and Buddhist Jataka tales that influenced much of his oeuvre. Painted just two years before his death, this work exemplifies the clarity and confidence of Keyt’s mature style, with assured contours and an intuitive balance between line, colour and form.