Lot 15 , Suzie Zamit, (b.1957), Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 2021, bronze, H.36 x W.26 cm

Suzie Zamit
(b.1957)
Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 2021
bronze
first in an edition of 25,
This work is currently a work in progress. Please refer to previous examples of the artist's portraits in bronze for reference. The portrait will be complete within three months of the auction. Please contact Jenny Levitan on jennylevitan.barefootopera@gmail.com for further information.
H.36 x W.26 cm
£4,000-5,000
Suzie Zamit has created her new portrait head of the pioneering modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) especially for the Barefoot Opera Art Auction in support of the Bloom Britannia project. The auction is taking place at the Charleston Farmhouse, gathering point for the Bloomsbury Group, of which Woolf was a leading member.

Zamit is a figurative sculptor concerned with expressing the character, strength and fragility of human and animal forms, through the “wonderfully fleshy and tactile medium of clay”. Her work, she says, has been “inspired by the terracotta maquettes of the Renaissance sculptors – small-scale models with lively sketchy surfaces full of the artists’ tool marks and fingerprints. These quick studies have an immediacy and vibrancy which can be missing in the smooth perfection of the finished marble.”

She studied Fine Art Sculpture at City & Guilds of London Art School and has been a council member of the Society of Portrait Sculptors since 2007 and has recently been elected Vice President. She lives and works in St Leonards-on-Sea.

Zamit’s work is in many private and public collections. Her many public commissions include designs for the Royal Mint of a Charles Darwin £2 coin in 2009 and Britannia bullion coins in 2010 and 2016. Her portrait of the Victorian MP and founder of the National Secular Society, Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91), was unveiled in Parliament in November 2016 and is now in the Palace of Westminster. Other commissions include portraits of Jane Austen, Charlie Chaplin, Francis Bacon and Nancy Astor.