Alison Watt : The Sun Never Knew How Wonderful It Was

17 Mar-7 May 2016

Overview

The Scottish painter’s first exhibition in London since her residency and solo show at the National Gallery in 2008. The starting point for Watt’s new work is an extended engagement with a masterwork by Peter Paul Rubens, Venus Frigida (1614), in the collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The painting was included in Rubens and His Legacy at the Royal Academy of Arts in early 2015, where Watt had the opportunity to study it. She describes the way of working that these new paintings embody as a process in which the familiar becomes something new and strange. In paintings such as Venus (2015), Slip (2015) or Moor (2015), the human figure is seemingly absent but it is strongly implied. The resulting paintings of swathes of fabric are both sensuous and analytical, meditative and powerfully animated, and psychologically charged.