Uglow painted Standing Nude, 1954, during the same phase as Seated Nude, c. 1954, working alongside Coldstream in the Slade school studios just after completing his studies at the school. Even whilst a student, Uglow was viewed as an artist with equal ability and potential as his teachers. He was at the heart of an inter-generational network of artists in London, exchanging ideas in abstract and material form by gifting one another drawings and paintings. Whilst Seated Nude was owned by Uglow’s teacher, Claude Rogers, Uglow gave Standing Nude to fellow student at the Slade, and future Professor of the Slade, Patrick George on the occasion of George’s marriage. On an intimate scale, in Standing Nude Uglow depicts a full-length model, front-on to the viewer with weight on her right leg in a classical contrapposto. Standing Nude represents a moment in Uglow’s oeuvre during the mid-1950s as he crossed the threshold from youthful work into artistic maturity. With Standing Nude Uglow already identifies motifs that would reoccur throughout his career: concerns with movement, perspective, the potent space between figuration and abstraction, anatomy, and, fundamentally, with using the genre of the nude to push figuration to its extremes. In miniature form, Standing Nude prefigures Uglow’s later monumental advancing nudes, exploring the strange disquiet of a nude bearing down upon the viewer. Whilst Seated Nude existed through specificity, with Standing Nude Uglow lingers in the uncertain, the latent and inferred. Sculpturally solid legs and torso elide into entirely flat shoulders, arms and face which are enveloped by the background of three horizontal blocks of deep red, applied with broad strokes of the brush. Her pink flesh is tonally close to the red behind, but in her face and arms red paint bleeds over the contours so figure and ground intermingle. Uglow blurs the distinction between figuration and abstraction, revealing the fluidity of the boundary and the ease of slipping between with a few strokes of paint. Uglow never deemed a work complete – the process of research and analysis was never-ending. Visual evidence to cement his artistic proposition of a believable and lived world in paint form could continually be mined. Each session in the studio provided fresh material to consider, every day presented a new challenge to perceptual understanding. Intimate and exquisite, the model of Standing Nude has an unassailable presence, suspended in perpetual near-completion as process becomes substance.