Chantal Joffe @ Skarstedt Paris - "The Dog’s Birthday" Exhibition

Chantal Joffe: The Dog’s Birthday

Skarstedt Paris

April 3 – May 31, 2025

Skarstedt Paris presents The Dog’s Birthday, Chantal Joffe’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in Paris since 2001. 

As Olivia Laing notes in their essay, ‘Losing Time Again,’ ‘the paintings that comprise The Dog’s Birthday are concerned with time, especially lost time and the possibilities of time’s recovery that art presents. As the bathetic title suggests, they are focused on ordinary domestic activities – ironing, reading, washing, eating – and small festivities, a plethora of ways of passing and marking time. Time has been spent logging what would otherwise be casual moments, haphazard and unstaged. People loiter about or play with their phones, take baths, gather around a cake, cuddle a dog. It’s exactly the cargo contained in almost anybody’s iPhone library, a log of days.’

There is a particularly French precedent to art that focuses so intensely on the domestic and the quotidian, from Bonnard’s baths to Vuillard’s intimiste interiors.

 ‘I made this show,’ Chantal Joffe says, ‘thinking about Paris – about Vuillard in particular and how he painted in apartments his family lived in, and how the family dramas play out against the changing wallpaper and the newspaper reading of the everyday – and how for him colour is tone and tone is everything.’

 At the same time, the paintings in The Dog’s Birthday are freighted with a curious unease, a desire to stop time in its tracks, to freeze the frame on even the most inconsequential moment or ordinary scene. The works were made in the long shadow of grief, in the wake of a series of family bereavements. One might think again of Vuillard, and of a painting like At Table (1893), with its cast of mourning sisters at a cluttered table. But Chntal Joffe’s paintings are equally preoccupied with literature, and especially the work of Marcel Proust. Appropriately for a Paris show, the book that Chantal Joffe is reading in several of her self-portraits, including Reading in Bed (2025), is In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s mammoth meditation on time and loss, and the complex mediatory role of memory in navigating grief and change.

To quote from Olivia Laing’s essay again, ‘Time is not totally lost when it has passed into the past, so long as it can be recalled. Any event, any moment can be summoned back. But the potentially recoverable nature of past time has to be set against its plasticity, the way it is redrawn and recoloured by the changes in perspective, context, awareness that occur as the individual is drawn inexorably along the tracks of chronological time.’ 

In these extraordinary paintings, there is an accommodation between the desire to cling to time and the possibilities that art offers to experiment imaginatively with loss and leaving.

The previous exhibition Self-Portraits is on view at Skarstedt Paris through March 29.

SKARSTEDT PARIS

2 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris

www.skarstedt.com

Chantal Joffe @ Victoria Miro, London - "Story"

Chantal Joffe: Story

Victoria Miro, London

4 June – 31 July 2021

CHANTAL JOFFE 

Self-Portrait Naked with My Mother I, 2020

Oil on board

243 x 181.5 cm - 95 5/8 x 71 1/2 in

© Chantal Joffe

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Victoria Miro presents new works by CHANTAL JOFFE. Accompanied by an artist’s book with a new text by Olivia Laing, Story features paintings of the artist’s mother and considers issues of aging, motherhood and visibility, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time.

The exhibition is the third in a trilogy that began with a year of self-portraits, shown at Victoria Miro in 2019, followed by For Esme – with Love and Squalor, which captured the changing faces across the years of Joffe and her daughter, Esme, on view at Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2020.

Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathetic warmth her work is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, apparently simple yet always questioning, complex and emotionally rich.

The exhibition includes a number of new paintings of the artist’s mother, Daryll, part of an ongoing series that Joffe began some three decades ago. These works, some painted from family photographs, others from life, range back and forth in time. The Story of the title refers to a painting depicting the artist and her two sisters as children in the early 1970s, snuggled up on a sofa with their mother as they share a bedtime story. Other paintings show Daryll now, alone – standing in her doorway, reclining on sofa after a cataract operation – or accompanied by Joffe, the shifts in dynamic as much emotional and psychological as they are physical but no less palpable. As Olivia Laing writes in the accompanying publication, ‘Over the years, a kind of hardening takes place, a process of separation and individuation on both sides. It’s not just that everyone gets older, but rather that time occasions a shift in perspective and visibility too. The mother recedes inch by inch, becoming smaller and harder, emerging as a person with needs and sadnesses in her own right…’

Born in 1969, CHANTAL JOFFE lives and works in London. The acclaimed British painter has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Royal Academy of Arts, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Jewish Museum, New York; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Neuberger Museum of Art, New York. Her work is in numerous institutional and private collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts; National Portrait Gallery, London; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Joffe has created a major new public work for the Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel, London, which will be on view when the Crossrail station opens in 2021.

Currently on view (until 8 August 2021), The Artist’s Mother: Lucie and Daryll, featuring Lucian Freud and Chantal Joffe, is a virtual exhibition presented by IMMA, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, in partnership with Victoria Miro and Vortic, the leading virtual and augmented reality platform for the art world, and hosted on Vortic and at imma.ie. Inspired by two of Freud’s most outstanding portraits of his mother, The Painter’s Mother Reading, 1975, and Painter’s Mother Resting I, 1976, the presentation features an exceptional series of paintings and pastels by Joffe of her mother, Daryll, and will be followed by a gallery display of the pastels in the Freud Centre.

CHANTAL JOFFE

A new artist’s book with text by Olivia Laing

accompanies the exhibition, published by

Victoria Miro on 4 June, price £20.00

VICTORIA MIRO

16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

www.victoria-miro.com

Chantal Joffe @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - Teenagers

Chantal Joffe: Teenagers

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

November 12, 2020 – January 29, 2021

Lehmann Maupin announces Teenagers—an exhibition of new works by American-born, London-based artist CHANTAL JOFFE. For her first exhibition with Lehmann Maupin and her first solo show in Seoul, Chantal Joffe has produced a new body of work around the theme of teenagers. This series investigates the choreography of display and the ways individual appearances are carefully constructed and codified, whether in a fashion magazine or the family album. Chantal Joffe offers a witty neutrality to her subjects, giving equal billing to catwalk models, porn actresses, mothers and children, loved ones, and literary heroines. Teenagers invites us to question our assumptions about what makes a noble subject and challenges our expectations of what feminist art might be.

Chantal Joffe is best known for her ability to bring a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Whether in paintings a few inches square or ten feet high, her deceptively casual brushstrokes and ability to combine fluidity with a pragmatic approach to representation seduces and disarms. Almost always depicting women or girls, sometimes in groups, Joffe’s paintings only tenuously adhere to their source material―be it a photograph, magazine page, or even a reflection in the mirror―instead reminding us that distortions of scale and form can often make a subject seem more real. Tensions between the scale of the work and the apparent intimacy of Joffe’s scenes heighten already complex narratives about connection, perception, and representation. These narratives, implicit in the relationship between artist and subject, are extended to the viewer as a series of propositions and provocations.

For Teenagers, Chantal Joffe presents a series that documents the vulnerability and insouciance of adolescents. The boys and girls depicted avoid a direct gaze, glancing to the side or looking at the floor from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, with arms and hands awkwardly poised as though the subjects are uncomfortable in the skin of their rapidly-changing bodies. The paintings portray a sense of intimacy―friendships budding or relationships and self awareness maturing. The psychology of Joffe’s portraiture is elusive, her subjects often pensive and sometimes self-absorbed. Laying bare the physical effort of their making and suffused with a palpable empathetic warmth, Chantal Joffe’s paintings deeply question ever-shifting human connections and the endless intricacies of looking. Ultimately, the subject of Joffe’s painting is life: she charts the process of living and aging, tracing the difficulties, disappointments, and small victories to be subtly decoded from the faces and gestures of her painted subjects.

During the 1990s, Chantal Joffe gained attention for her small-scale paintings of pornography in which she practiced precision and rigorous self-editing: “I wanted clear, bright color, clean lines between light and shade. The subject matter was wild enough, but I wanted to contain my own expressiveness in this very deliberate way.” This expressiveness has become Chantal Joffe’s signature style―though she veers in scale between the miniature and the larger-than-life, her scenes of leisure and domestic life are gestural and created with broad brushstrokes that leave a residue of wet paint tracking down the surface of the painting. Interested in nature’s entire reproductive drama, Joffe transitioned to works related to motherhood following the birth of her daughter Esme in 2004. Building upon a fundamental interest in the intimate and the desire for parents to capture their children as they grow and change, Chantal Joffe’s work has since evolved to turn its attention toward teenagers, the focus of her show at Lehmann Maupin.

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, the passage of time, and art's relationship to history. Joffe has exhibited nationally and internationally with venues including IMMA  Collection:  Freud  Project, Dublin, Ireland (2020); The Foundling Museum, London, UK (2020); Scottish National Gallery  of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019); 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). Chantal Joffe is represented by Victoria Miro.

LEHMANN MAUPIN 

74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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