Rebecca Ness’s Kelley (2025) is a portrait of a close friend reclining nude on a sofa. It belongs to a lineage of figurative painting, with Lucian Freud – her declared artistic hero – a clear point of reference. The tonal rigour is unmistakable: cool blue undertones, the translucence of veins, the way flesh folds into the sofa’s creases.

Yet where Freud pursued froideur, a near-clinical precision in recording the facts of flesh –once remarking that he treated the head as “just another limb” – Ness moves in another register. Her realism is intimate, elastic. She adjusts what she sees to serve a narrative, summoning not only the body but the atmosphere of its world.

Freud’s methods are retooled through her own lived experience. Her sitters are not objects but subjects, rendered with tenderness and specificity. Where Freud maintained distance, Ness collapses it. In working on Kelley, artist and sitter looked through photographs together, discussing how she wanted to be portrayed – collaboration replacing detachment.

A familiar tension surfaces here: the play between inside and outside. Kelley lies unclothed on the sofa, but the world insists on intruding. Beyond the window, a street with its bright double yellow line slices through the view. A detail so banal it normally escapes attention becomes insistent, pressing against the privacy of the room. This juxtaposition heightens the vulnerability of the body, placing tenderness in sharp relation to the indifference of the city beyond.

This is where Ness departs most decisively from Freud. Her portraits are never hermetically sealed, never only about flesh on canvas. They fold the subject into the wider world – neighbourhoods, relationships, the textures of daily life. In Kelley, intimacy is not isolated from its setting but bound to it: the body is present, but so too is the hum of the street outside, the evidence of a shared, ongoing life.