CHANTAL JOFFE – STORY
2021-06-21Joffe’s paintings of the artist’s mother, Daryll, are part of an ongoing series that the artist began some three decades ago. These new works, some painted from family photographs, others from life, range back and forth in time. There are depictions of Joffe and her siblings with their mother as children – on a sofa, on a train, on holiday, as newborns and, in the case of Train to Vermont, which shows Daryll pregnant with Chantal, as not-yet-born. As Joffe explains, ‘I suddenly thought, but nobody in their seventies is just that – they’re not just an older person who’s lonely, or isolated, or has health issues… Everybody is the whole life that went before that. So, I started looking at all our family photos and thinking about my mum and all the things she’d done in her life and how she seemed to me when I was a child…’
The Story of the exhibition title refers to a painting depicting the artist and her two older sisters as children in the early 1970s, snuggled up on a sofa with their mother as they share a bedtime story. In the accompanying publication, Olivia Laing writes, ‘What’s remarkable about Joffe’s picture is that she’s managed to plug into a universal current, to capture and convey not just her own childhood, but mine and perhaps yours too.’
Opposite – Me, Em and Nat, 2020
Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2021
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW
London
