Nawi Samaraweera

A carved wooden figure named Kanya wins the national sculpture competition of 1988 and passes into the permanent collection of the National Art Gallery, the work of a sculptor whose craft was shaped by the example of Tissa Ranasinghe. Nawi Samaraweera belongs to a generation trained at the Government College of Fine Arts in Colombo, the school then called Heywood, and to the seam of abstraction that ran through Sri Lankan sculpture after the ’43 Group.

He was born on 26 July 1947 at Kamburupitiya, and took his degree in sculpture at the Government College of Fine Arts, then called Heywood, in Colombo in 1971, where Tissa Ranasinghe was among those who inspired him. He worked in terracotta, cement and wood, towards abstraction rather than the figure, and held his first solo exhibition at the Samudra Gallery, Colombo, in 1973.

His formation places him within the Late Modern decades: trained at the end of the 1960s, exhibiting from the early 70s, working an abstract idiom that the ’43 Group had not attempted and the contemporary movement of the 1990s had not yet reached. Kanya, the wood sculpture that took the 1988 national prize, remains his best-known work.

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Selected works

1. Kanya, wood · National Art Gallery, Colombo; winner of the national sculpture competition, 1988.
   • Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawi_Samaraweera
   • Alt: ‘Nawi Samaraweera, Kanya, a carved wood sculpture that won the 1988 national sculpture competition and entered the National Art Gallery, Colombo.’