Collection highlights tour

Following his Sigean abstractions, Whiteley's increasing preoccupation with the female torso led to his bathroom series which preserved the warm colours of his abstractions while constrasting them with the bathroom's acid blues and greens. The series signalled his breakthrough as a figure draughtsman and his desire to make eroticism more explicit: 'All the paintings I have made in the last four years have been concerned one way or another with sex and the desire to record sensual behaviour.' - Brett Whiteley 1964 Focusing on the naked form of his wife Wendy in the bath, Whiteley's Woman in bath series, captured the tactility and tones of her flesh with a profound intimacy, rarely equalled in later paintings on this subject.