Couples (Back Study)

Saville, who is renowned for her larger-than-life paintings of un-idealized women, is associated with the group called the Young British Artists, which came to prominence in the early 1990s. From a young age, she was influenced by the art of Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, whose works she encountered firsthand on memorable trips with a relative. In this sheet, she blends entangled figures rendered in a realist style with dynamic marks to convey a sense of time and movement. Drawing such as this takes form during hours-long sessions which Saville compares to performances: "I draw lots of figures and they start to collapse and then I build them back up again." She has said that it is a "massive freedom" to work in charcoal and pastel rather than oil paint: "Just because of the transparency of drawing, you've got the possibility of multiple bodies. It's an attempt to make multiple realities exist together rather than one sealed image."