Chantal Joffe
Born 1969
Chantal Joffe is a British-American contemporary artist renowned for her distinctive approach to portraiture, which captures the complexities of human emotion through a bold and expressive style. Born in 1969 in St. Albans, Vermont, she relocated to London at thirteen years of age, where she has lived and worked ever since. Joffe received her BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 1991 and her MA from the prestigious Royal College of Art in 1994.
Joffe’s artistic journey has been consistently anchored by an exploration of the human form—primarily focusing on the women and children in her life, but extending this interest outwards toward the women who populate advertisements and fashion magazines—and a commitment to an intimate and immediate engagement with her subjects. Her work draws inspiration from a diverse range of sources, including art history, popular culture, and personal experiences. With a keen eye for color and masterful handling of paint, Joffe creates works that are simultaneously bold and tender, capturing an innate sense of vulnerability and strength. Her style is further characterized by loose brushstrokes, an almost crude style of rendering, and an energetic yet fluid mark-making. She often depicts women at various stages of their lives, such as her daughter, Esme, who has grown up on Joffe’s canvases.
Her subjects—children, mothers, models, and the like—are often those members of society who are overlooked or unappreciated for one reason or another. By tending to them without hierarchy or judgement, Joffe questions what makes a subject “worthy” of being painted while simultaneously revealing to her viewers the ways in which appearances are constructed and presented, even in the most private of moments. Familiar and heartfelt, her work is likewise psychological and visceral, with an unnerving quality to them that gives her women the multifaceted nature they are due: for as much as femininity should be celebrated, it is not without its dark side. Joffe explores both sides of this coin with deftness and care.
Joffe’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world, including Victoria Miro, Venice (2023); Koohouse Museum, Yangpyong, Korea (2022); Lehmann Maupin, Beijing (2021); Arnolfini, Bristol (2020); The Lowry, Salford (2018); Jewish Museum, New York (2015); and the National Portrait Gallery, London (2015). She received the Royal Academy Wollaston Prize in 2006. In 2018, she created a public installation for the Whitechapel stop on the Elizabeth Line in London, titled A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel. Joffe’s work can be found in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; National Portrait Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Royal College of Art, London.
