British painter Chantal Joffe has received widespread acclaim for her psychologically-charged figurative language. Working loosely from photographic sources, she brings her subjects to life through rich, lyrical brushwork, imbuing them with emotional vitality and warmth. ‘When you are painting,’ she says, ‘that is the most alive, the most present tense, you are ever going to be. There’s nothing else.’ Included in the 2013 exhibition Body Language at the Saatchi Gallery, Untitled is an early work that demonstrates her fascination with intimate scenes, posing important questions about the voyeuristic relationship between artist, muse and onlooker. Much of her practice seeks to subvert the ‘male gaze’ through depictions of women, making the present work a comparatively rare example of a male subject in her oeuvre. Following her solo retrospective at The Lowry, Salford in 2018, Joffe exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2019, and featured in the Foundling Museum’s group show Portraying Pregnancy earlier this year. She was recently commissioned to create a major public artwork for the new Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel, due to open in 2021.