Victoria Miro is delighted to present new works by Chantal Joffe. Accompanied by an artist’s book with a new text by Olivia Laing, Story features a number of 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.
“When they work it feels like some of that memory and time got caught in the paint.” –Chantal Joffe
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.
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.”
The exhibition is available to view by free timed ticket. It is also viewable on Vortic, the leading virtual and augmented reality platform for the art world.
