Chantal Joffe
Vita
2010
15 colour screenprint on Somerset Satin 300 gsm.
50 × 65 cm
Edition of 30 copies, signed and numbered by the artist, on the verso side.
Out of stock
about this work
Chantal Joffe created Vita, 2010, an exuberant image of a young girl holding a pencil, in tribute to the American portrait painter Alice Neel. Joffe’s celebrated figure paintings feature young women whose lithe outlines pulsate within lush, Munch-like interiors and cityscapes. This lyrical portrayal of a child, on the verge of tumbling over, combines pastoral innocence and new life with a hint of mischief.
about Chantal Joffe
Possessing a humorous eye for everyday awkwardness and an enlivening facility with paint, Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity to the genre of figurative art. Hers is a deceptively casual brushstroke. Whether in small or large-scale images, fluidity combined with a pragmatic approach to representation seduces and disarms simultaneously. Almost always depicting women or girls, sometimes in groups but recently in iconic portraits, the paintings only waveringly adhere to their photographic source, instead of reminding us that distortions of the brush or pencil can often make a subject seem more real.
Joffe questions assumptions about what makes a noble subject for art and challenges what our expectations of feminist art might be. She ennobles the people she paints by rehabilitating the photographic image but, crucially, recognizes that it is painting itself rather than attendant sociopolitical ideas that give her paintings complexity and keep us looking.
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