CHANTAL JOFFE

Joffe’s paintings always alert us to how appearances are carefully constructed and codified, whether in a fashion magazine or the family album, and to the choreography of display. There’s witty neutrality in a career-spanning line-up that has given equal billing to catwalk models, porn actresses, mothers and children, loved ones and literary heroines. Joffe questions assumptions about what makes a noble subject for art and challenges what our expectations of a feminist art might be. Appropriation of existing imagery has been a cornerstone, particularly in the works for which she first became known. Joffe ennobles the people she paints by rehabilitating the photographic image but, crucially, recognises that it is paint itself—its spatio-temporal complexities rather than attendant theories or sociopolitical ideas surrounding subject matter—that keeps us engaged.

For Joffe, notions of sensuality and self-disclosure are parcelled up in works of mobile immediacy. Tensions between the scale of the work and the apparent intimacy of the scene depicted heighten already complex narratives about connection, perception and representation that, implicit in the relationship between artist and subject, are extended to the viewer as a series of propositions and provocations. Often laying bare the physical effort of their making and suffused with a palpable empathetic warmth, Joffe’s paintings are nonetheless deeply questioning images about ever-shifting human connections and the endless intricacies of looking.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Royal Academy Wollaston Prize in 2006. Her recent solo exhibition titled Personal Feeling is the Main Thing at the The Lowry, Salford (2018) presented works from across Joffe’s career addressing themes of portraiture, motherhood, passing time and art’s relationship to history. Joffe has exhibited nationally and internationally with venues including Whitechapel Gallery, London [2018]; Royal Academy of Arts, London [2018, 2017]; National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík (2016); National Portrait Gallery, London (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2015); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2014–2015); Saatchi Gallery, London (2013–2014); MODEM, Hungary (2012); Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2009); University of the Arts, London (2007); MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2007); Galleri KB, Oslo (2005) and Bloomberg Space, London (2004).

Joffe will create a major new public work for the Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel. Titled A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel, the work will be on view when the Crossrail station opens in 2019. The exhibition Art Capital: Art for the Elizabeth Line at Whitechapel Gallery (March 13–May 6, 2018) brought together unseen material from all the artists contributing to the Crossrail Art Programme.

Courtesy Lehmann Maupin