Chantal Joffe

An exhibition of new work by Chantal Joffe, in which celebrated writers keep company with the artist's friends and family members. Practising painting and drawing as the loving collection of subjects, people met in the flesh and on the page, Joffe prompts a re-evaluation of notions of self-disclosure and intimacy in the making of work. 

A long-time observer of her immediate surroundings, Joffe's practice springs from the non-transferable nature of experience; a recent strain of her work places her commitment to the sensing, fleshy place from which a painter paints in relation to confessional poetry. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, among others, introduced to their work in the second half of the twentieth century the texture of lived experience, loosening formal strictures as they complicated, rather than collapsed, the relationship between personality and creative output.