The title is taken from the Beatles’ cover of the Bernstein/Sondheim song from West Side Story.

When Furr began his degree in Fine Art at De Montfort University in Leicester, he found inspiration for his work at the college 'Kimberlin library'. 

"I discovered a huge archive of film stills from kitchen sink dramas of the 60s.

I started watching a lot of  black and white films and discovering things like ‘A Kind of Loving’ with Alan Bates and the quirky writing of Shelagh Delaney and ‘A Taste of Honey’. 
At college, I did etchings based on these 'kitchen sink' dramas that also included lines from the films.
‘Look Back In Anger’ with Richard Burton and Clare Bloom included an image of the couple in a confined space with the female protagonist at an ironing board.
When the ironing board appeared on stage in the orginal production at the Royal Court in 1956 it was considered groundbreaking.
I liked the motif. I painted ‘There’s a Place’ later, when I had moved to London, in a studio flat in Crouch End with my girlfriend, now wife, Emma. It was basic living. The sofa was also a 'Z-bed'. 

I asked the couple upstairs who were friends to pose in our flat, and I transposed the kitchen sink aesthetic from the 60s - that I was inspired by at college - to my life then in the nineties.

In the spirit of realism I made no effort to erase  the light switch on the wall or the cable from the iron. The squaring up lines on the canvas that I use to transpose my smaller sketch are still visible and if you look closely at the space on the wall in the middle of the canvas, you will see what look like scribbles. I could lie and say it was me paying homage to Cy Twombly, but

in actuality it is just where I had been wiping out my brushes on the canvas. I kept these marks slightly visible because I liked them. It reminds you of the process and that this is just paint."

'There's a place' was one of the first of Furr’s paintings of men and women in an enironment which were later developed into settings in hotel rooms in the 2000s. It has an element of humour in that it plays with the idea of traditional roles.

It was an early depiction in Furr's oeuvre of the ‘theatre of relationships’ here set against a realist backdrop and the realism of a domestic environment.

"View archive of works from Whitechapel 

Archive of Christian Furr Portraits