"Introspection (Self-Portrait with Witness)"

LOT 7

ALIEASE SIMMONS Introspection (Self-Portrait with Witness) Digital drawing [dimensions in inches] Executed in 2025

PROVENANCE:

• Artist's studio

• Direct from the artist

CONDITION: Excellent. Museum-quality presentation.

This haunting work represents Simmons' breakthrough in psychological drawing demonstrating her capacity to achieve not merely technical rendering but genuine emotional depth and formal innovation.

The composition presents a figure in crisis, hands framing face in universal gesture of concentration or distress. While horizontal lines fragment the image like digital scan lines or venetian blind shadows. A second figure watches from the shadows. Simmons' conceptual framework is sophisticated: the horizontal disruption effect serves as the work's heart, suggesting the glitch between who we are and how we're perceived, between analog human experience and digital representation.

The witness figure (shadowed woman) transforms this from self-portrait to psychological drama, raising questions Simmons explores throughout her work: Are we ever truly alone with our thoughts? Is introspection possible when we're always being observed by others, by devices, by algorithms?

Simmons' artistic choices demonstrate deep engagement with psychological portraiture Käthe Kollwitz's powerful graphite portraits, Lucian Freud's psychological drawing studies, Jenny Saville's contemporary figurative work. The museum-quality rendering required extensive refinement to achieve the balance between photorealistic detail and the disruption effect that gives the work its conceptual power.

While Simmons' historical pieces demonstrate her capacity to master Old Master techniques, this work proves her ability to create original contemporary art with psychological depth and formal innovation. The horizontal line effect is Simmons' invention a visual language for expressing contemporary anxiety about surveillance and fractured identity.

Simmons' process involved hundreds of iterations exploring different disruption patterns, figure positions, and degrees of shadow before achieving this specific balance of clarity and fragmentation. This labor-intensive refinement rejecting the vast majority of outputs until finding the precise emotional register demonstrates the artistic judgment that defines serious practice. Inquire for availability and acquisition details. Please see "How to Buy"

About the Medium: Created using AI  generative tools under Simmons' artistic direction

• Unframed: 40" × 60" (3.3' × 5')

• Framed: 48" × 68"