Chantal Joffe Mother and Child II
The women at the Victoria Miro Gallery make quite a first impression: I walk in to find a thin lady in a severe black dress bearing down on me with a nasty frown. Around the corner a mother, stark naked, is playing with her baby, whilst on the other side another woman is flashing her knickers at me.
These are the subjects of an impressive new exhibition by the young British artist Chantal Joffe. Joffe is known for her expressive paintings of women and children, drawn from sources as diverse as fashion magazines and pornography. Her latest exhibition quite literally takes her work to new heights: the canvases are huge - so big that Joffe had to use a scaffold to create them. It's a scale that is perfect for her lavish, paint-bingeing style. At 10 feet up, there's no room for flattering perspectives or soft brushstrokes.
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Source: thefirstpost.co.uk
Chantal Joffe Black Sleeveless Dress, 2005
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.
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Source: www.re-title.com