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Alison Watt @ Parafin Gallery
17 March 2016 - 7 May 2016
The starting point for Alison Watt’s new work “The Sun never knew how wonderful it was” 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. Rubens’ inspiration for the figure of Venus was a marble statue he had seen in Rome, and his extraordinary transposition of cold inert stone into voluptuous living flesh is a source of ongoing fascination for Watt.