Created with paint and fibreglass impasto, Marcus Harvey’s Study for Broken Lock combines the idealised aesthetics of high art with gritty realism. The materiality of the painting’s textured surface draws the viewer further into the illicit scene, the desire to look heightened with the desire to touch. Using the mimetic qualities of his medium, Harvey chisels graffiti, and inlays ‘tiles’, and renders the loo bog-grimy; only the thin-stencilled lines give solidified form to his painterly composition. Flirting between abstraction and peepshow, Harvey resituates theviewer’s gaze as something voyeuristic and self-conscious.