Chantal Joffe    Nov 19 - Jan 30, 2010

Exhibition
19.11.2009 – 30.01.2010
Tues – Sat, 3 – 7 pm

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by British painter Chantal Joffe.

Joffe is known for her portraits, painted in a fluid, smooth style, in which she is able to capture the emotions, weaknesses and vitality of human existence. Her subjects are often female: girls, adolescents and women seen in different moments of life.
The artist depicts them with a gaze that is halfway between the immediacy of a snapshot and a situation of emphatic distortion. These studies on the human condition express no judgments, but appear one after the other with great energy and engagement, also thanks to the bold rejection of any formal order. The psychological intensity of the figures makes our very opinion ambiguous, disturbing and gratifying us at the same time.

After the small studies of individual figures that brought Chantal Joffe great success and renown, in 2001 she moved on to paintings in which the style and the dimensions were expanded, and the figures appeared in groups inside a vast landscape. Since 2003 she has returned to individual figures, close up in a larger size, putting the accent on the pose and the atmosphere, the relationship with the surroundings, the clothing. The women are shown in well-defined interiors, seated at a table or in an armchair, lying down, by a window, or walking in the city.
In these new paintings the brushstrokes are still sensual and spontaneous, while the palette has been enriched with more discreet, variegated colours.

Her subjects often have surprisingly ambiguous origins. It isn’t clear whether the women depicted are real or created by the vivid, accurate imagination of Joffe.
The source of the images would seem to fluctuate between the portrait of a personal friend, an icon from the mass media and the artist’s imagination. Whatever their origin, they have the intensity and psychological richness of characters, like instants captured from the lives of literary heroines.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe has studied at Glasgow School of Art and in 1994 received her Master’s Degree form the royal College of Art, London. Associated with the second, more paint-focused wave of young British Artists, Chantal Joffe has shown in international galleries like Victoria Miro in London and Cheim and Read in New York, as well as in public spaces like The Saatchi Gallery and Blomberg Space in London. In 2006 she was awarded the Woolaston Price at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.