Alison Watt's practice is deeply concerned with the materiality of the objects she represents, influenced by the trompe l'oeil painters of the 17th century in her still life elements. Her large-scale paintings are a product of intense rumination, with the objects she depicts being taken out of their original context so that the viewer may fill in the gaps.
Read MoreWatt's initial success in her final years of art school came from her portraits and self-portraits, often of female nudes in airy interiors. From the mid-1980s for a period of 10 years, she worked every day with a life model in order to immerse herself in the study of the human figure.
Alison Watt, born 1965. Artist (1986—1987) shows the artist staring out from the canvas, hand on forehead as though checking her temperature, with an extremely muted colour palette of faded peach and duck egg blue.
In 1997, Watt completed the series 'Fold'__for Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, introducing fabric alongside her figures and marking a significant turning point in her practice. This was followed by her 'Shift' series (2000), featuring 12 large-scale works where the figure is removed entirely in favour of swathes of fabric. Although these artworks are without human counterpart, the negative space in the drapery suggest both organic forms and the meticulous silks in Ingres' portraits, which was direct inspiration for Sabine (2000).
From 2006—2008, Watt was awarded the prestigious Associate Artist residency at the National Gallery in London—the youngest in the award's history. The enveloping works produced, culminating in the series Phantom (2008), were inspired by her close contact with the works of old masters within the collection that she was allowed special access to. Pulse and Echo feature the subtle undulations of white fabric, this time in a knotted formation that directly mimics the popular Romantic collar of the 19th century, as seen in Ingres' Monsieur de Norvins (1811).
Similarly, Francisco de Zurbarán's Saint Francis in Meditation (1653—1659), particularly the swooping hood of his cowl, provided much of Watt's inspiration, as she became fascinated by the organic forms possible within fabric that suggest the implied presence of a body.
In 2020, Watt completed the series A Portrait Without Likeness inspired again by the work of an old master Allan Ramsay. Taking his sketchbooks and two portraits of Ramsay's wives Anne Bayne (1758—1760) and Margaret Lindsay (c.1739) as her starting point, she began to abstract still life elements from within the portraits—a rose with a broken stem, a lace collar and a quill—onto empty white backgrounds in order to reframe them and give them new narratives of their own. The title of the exhibition relates to Watt's treatment of these objects, as still life was traditionally a low genre of painting, and appeals to the viewer's imagination to give them new status and interest.
