Greaves first came to the attention of the art world when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1956 alongside other ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Drawing upon gritty scenes of working class suburban life, the movement sought to make political comment through sullen palettes of browns, blacks, and greys.
By the end of the 1960s, however, Greaves had become disillusioned with the social realism of their earlier work. In a significant departure from his austere, representational style, he began to clear his paintings of unnecessary clutter and started implementing new stylistic and compositional techniques, with a focus on line, flat colour, and ambiguous, poetic imagery with echoes of the work of Patrick Caulfield.