After several months spent in Italy in 1961, Brett Whiteley moved to London where he lived in an apartment close to where notorious murderer John Christie had strangled several women during the 1940s and early 1950s. Becoming preoccupied with these brutal murders, Whiteley produced a series of paintings depicting violated female bodies at close range, twisted and contorted near the point of abstraction. The nude female form became a recurrent motif for the artist and he returned to it repeatedly throughout his career, often in highly sexualised images of his wife Wendy.