Chantal Joffe
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Chantal Joffe (born 1969 in St. Albans) is an English artist based in London.
Joffe received her BA in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art in 1989 and her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art [1] in 1993.
She has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including “London Calling” at Galleri KB in Oslo, “John Moores 22” [2] at the Walker [3] in Liverpool, “The Way I See It” at Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris, “British Portrait 1” at Studio d’Arte Raffaelli [4] in Italy and “Big Girl, Little Girl” at Collective Gallery [5] in Edinburgh. She is represented by Victoria Miro [6] in London.
She won the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Prize in the 2006 Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition for her painting Blond Girl - Black Dress.
Chantal Joffe paints portraits of women and children in a variety of sizes, from very small to those requiring scaffolding to complete. Joffe takes her images from all over – fashion, advertising, pornography, snapshots – and translates them into purposely nonchalantly rendered paintings that offer no comfort zone between subject and viewer. Joffe’s women often stare right back, meeting the gaze of anyone who might want to judge them in their varying activities head-on; the unapologetic attitudes of Joffe’s characters are matched by her equally blasé painting style. Huge amounts of paint are applied to the canvas in a way that embraces accidental spillages, wonky draughtsmanship and not-quite-within-the-lines colouring. No matter their source or subject, Joffe’s pictures always end up looking like family photographs – their lack of pretension and wobbly execution speak of something inherently ‘amateur’ and unselfconscious that allows Joffe the space to create sometimes shocking images with an extraordinary amount of pathos and charm, even when they should be quite threatening.
