MAVIS BY GUNARATNAM ANNARATNAM POSTCARD (NOTHING IS FOREVER)

Annaratnam Gunaratnam. Mavis. 1953. Bronze, 49 x 37 x 22 cm. Gift of Sadhonadevi Gunaratnam. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

Annaratnam Gunaratnam was a women who has sustained her practice through commissions. She was an important artist in the genre of portrait sculpture. She produced portrait sculptures of many dignitaries like Mahatma Gandhi, and Swami Vivekananda, were presented to the Ramakrishna Mission Bartley Road Singapore. She was also important in the field of art education. She taught art at the Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur, and then as head of the art department at the Raffles Girls' Secondary School from 1948 to 1968 in Singapore. She also taught art to boys at the Beatty Secondary School before her early retirement.This sculpture shows strong technical ability in casting, capturing the flowing lines of her clothes and detailed features of her facial expression. Her commitment to realism is shown in her focus on details and her representation of women not as "idealised types" but as an individual with her own subjectivity, depicted with strength and dignity distinguishes the representation of the female sculptural form from other sculptors of that period.

Dimension: 148 x 105 mm