 Black Sleeveless Dress, 2005 Oil on board, 183 x 183 x 6.3 cm Chantal Joffe Victoria Miro Gallery is delighted to present a new series of large scale paintings by Chantal Joffe in her fourth exhibition with the gallery. Known for her expressive studies of women and children, these new paintings represent a shift away from the intimacy characteristic of Joffe's previous work. Her fluid and deliberately disintegrating painting style is carried out on a scale that boldly distorts the familiar figurative elements of her work, and serves to heighten the sense of the physicality of paint and the process of painting itself. Joffe's women appear to invade the canvas with their monumental presence; limbs dissolve into large areas of light and dark, and backdrops and clothes turn into blocks of semi-abstract shapes and patterns. Joffe's distinct style of painting offers an uncompromising sense of strength, complexity and momentum to the female figures she portrays. As in her previous work, her women resist any determined narrative and possess ambiguous origins. With their bodies fragmented and often distorted by scale, with their direct gaze and individual style, Joffe's women demand to be looked at but refuse to be defined. Rather than figuring as portraits of known subjects, the women keep their own company in a combination of beguilement and confrontation. It is their ability to express at once both strength and fragility, even on a scale such as this that distinguishes this body of work and gives impetus to the psychological relationship Joffe negotiates between the women and their viewers. Chantal Joffe (b. 1969) has a BA from Glasgow School of Art and an MA from the Royal College of Art. She attended the British School at Rome and has exhibited internationally including solo shows at Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris, Monica de Cardenas in Milan and Il Capricorno in Venice. Group exhibitions include the forthcoming "The Wonderful Fund on Tour", Le Musée de Marrakech, Morocco, 2005, "London Calling", Galleri KB, Oslo, 2005, and Bloomberg Space, London, 2004. Exhibition: 19 November - 17 December 2005 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Victoria Miro Gallery 16 Wharf Road GB-London N1 7RW Telephone +44 (0) 20 7336 8109 Fax +44 (0) 20 7251 5596 Email info@victoria-miro.com www.victoria-miro.com |
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