Chantal Joffe: Story, Victoria Miro

Chantal Joffe’s contemporary approach to portraiture has won her critical acclaim the world over. Executed in a fluid, smooth style, her unflinching portraits of women capture the ‘emotions, weakness and vitality of human existence’. Today her work can be found in such prestigious museum collections as the Royal Academy in London, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and The Met in New York. They are also highly sought after by collectors of contemporary art at auction.

In this series of portraits – which includes a number of new paintings of the artist’s mother Darryll – Joffe tackles issues of aging, motherhood and invisibility, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time. The exhibition will also include a selection of large-scale pastel self-portraits.

For Joffe, the visceral nature of pastel adds a sense of intensity and immediacy to the portrait. ‘You can get a kind of brutality with pastel that you can’t with paint,’ she once said. ‘With paint there’s always an extension of your arm and brush. Whereas pastel is so primitive. You can’t draw hard enough.’