Alison Watt

Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Fold: New Paintings 1996 - 97, 4 October - 15 November 1997, nos.4 and 5, illustrated in the catalogue.

Original canvas in excellent original condition with strong fluid impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there are two small areas that flouresce in the upper right corner of the left hand panel however, these are likely to be small retouchings to the white paint by the artist. Presented unframed, the diptych should be hung 6in. apart.
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After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1988, Watt quickly became well known for her bold and intensely observed figurative style. During this period, she focussed primarily on depicting the female nude within untidy domestic spaces surrounded by everday objects such as unmade bed sheets and crumpled clothes (see for example Sleeping Nude, 1989, Private Collection).  Increasingly, she developed an interest in the texture and material nature of these objects themselves and drapery and fabric became integral components of her compositions.

The interest in texture led to a reassessment of the work of her long term inspiration, Jean Auguste Ingres. She looked once again at his opulent 19th century Odalisques and in contrast to the more formal portraits of Mesdames Rivière and Moitessier, '...what I came to realise was that the paintings of fabric were more sensual than the paintings of the body' (Watt, quoted in Alison Watt, exh.cat., Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004, unpaginated).  Her discovery prompted an important series of diptychs including the present work which released the female figure from within the confines of her earlier cluttered domestic spaces and paired them with a panel devoted to decorative printed fabric and swathes of material. Each work in the series is closely related to specific Odalisques and in the present case, Sleeper; Fragment II directly references Ingres' Odalisque and Slave (fig.1, 1839, Coll. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge).  The reclining Sleeper clearly takes her pose from Ingres' Odalisque whilst the white rectangle in the bottom right corner of the present work refers to the section of drapery in Ingres' composition that in turn provides the compositional arrangement for the left hand panel of the present diptych.

Included in her seminal exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, the present work is crucial in demonstrating the counterpoint between figuration and abstraction that has become a defining feature of Watt's oeuvre. The highly figurative nude references her earlier more representation style whilst the abstract contours and textures of the left hand panel are prophetic of her more recent work, notably her exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Shift, in 2000 where Watt exhibited twelve large paintings which all took swags of material as their sole subject.