Self-portrait

Alison Watt is one of ScotlandÂ’s most distinguished contemporary artists and this is the first of her works to be acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She was born in Scotland, trained at Glasgow School of Art and lives and works in Edinburgh. Watt has said that all her painting is a kind of self-portraiture. In her recent work with textiles, the body has become acutely abstracted, with folds of cloth becoming elusively suggestive of the human body. However this earlier painting offers a rare and strikingly direct example of a traditional self-portrait by the artist. This painting was presented to the gallery by the Art Fund to celebrate its reopening after refurbishment in 2011.