The Athlete

Shawzin (1920-2021, South African) was a prolific sculptor known for the variety of materials she worked in, including wood, bronze, metal and marble, the latter of which she often acquired from the famous quarries at Carrara. Working from her Cape Town studio in her later career, which included its own foundry, her sculpture was most often of the human figure. Partly influenced by her trauma at growing up through the divisiveness and oppression of the apartheid era in South Africa, she sought a kind of humanist universalism in her figuration.

This often meant, as with the current work on exhibition, that she eschewed detailed features and individuated characteristics in her work, in favour of flows and sinuous curves in both her single figure works and her pairs or groups that are full exhibit poised energy, dynamism and grace. Her work has been exhibited and collected around the world, and was the subject of a sold-out auction in London last year.