Channa Bankier painted this self-portrait two years after her studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Like many young artists of the 1970s, she was a radical, both artistically and politically. In her art, she combines this with an interest in Jewish and oriental mysticism. In the 1970s there was a growing emphasis on bringing female experiences and new images of women into art. The forms in Bankier’s self-portrait are disparate and the red hair is deliberately unruly.