Ketevan Magalashvili – Georgian portraiture prize winner

Ketevan Magalashvili (1894-1973) was a Georgian oil painter. She studied in the School for Oil Painting and Sculpture of the Caucasus Society for Promoting Fine Arts in Tiflis - before it become the Oil Painting Department of the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts.

She also studied in Moscow at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1914-1917, and returned to Tbilisi in 1917 where she worked in the National Gallery’s Library from 1921. The Gallery’s founder, Dimitri Shevardnadze suggested that she should specialize in the genre of portraiture.

Ketevan Magalashvili received government funds in 1923 to travel to Munich in Germany and to Paris in France, where she took an art course at the Academie Colarossi. She returned to Georgia in 1926 to work as a painter and restorer at the National Gallery and the Metekhi Museum of Arts.

She won the people’s artist of Georgia award in 1961 for her portrait paintings.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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