Alison Watt born 1965

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Shift, 2000-01, no.11, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue;
London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Alison Watt: New Paintings, 2002.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Alison Watt was at the forefront of a generation of Scottish artists whose work concentrated on the figure, intensely observed and depicted. However, an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, Fold, introduced sections that reproduced highly decorative printed fabrics, making reference to both abstraction and earlier painters, particularly Ingres. With the exhibition Shift in 2000, Watt exhibited twelve large paintings which took as their sole subject swags of material. Their almost abstracted imagery seems to invite tangible investigation, and they convey a sense of human presence without actual evidence.

'It's only in the last few years I've realised the power of suggestion; that's where the erotic lies'