The Jerwood Gallery is beginning the New Year with a major exhibition of Chantal Joffe works featuring Hastings and St Leonards. The Jerwood Gallery will display a selection of powerful portraits of women and children that combine insight, integrity and wit. This exhibition will celebrate Joffe’s strong connections with Hastings and St Leonards. With Hastings beach, in particular, is featured in the background of many of her paintings.
The exhibition will feature a number of new, and unseen works painted specifically for the show – along with a selection of works spanning the past 13 years of Joffe’s practice. The artist has long-standing links with Hastings and regularly visits family who live in the town. The coastal landscape is an intoxicating inspiration for Joffe, and she spends a great deal of her time sitting on the beach, drawing.
The artist possesses a humorous eye for everyday awkwardness and an enlivening facility with paint, Joffe brings a combination of intuition and honesty to the genre of figurative art. Joffe paints with expressive fluidity, and uses broad brush-strokes and distortions to capture personality and a sense of movement. She achieves this whether the image is micro or macro in stature.
The artist often works from photographs, creating arresting portraits that seduce and disarm simultaneously. Joffe’s paintings have a profound personal intensity to them; many on display at Jerwood Gallery depict women or young girls, in particular her daughter and niece.
The exhibition will be co-curated by Rose Wylie an artist who in her late 70s saw blossoming critical recognition. Wylie launched Jerwood Gallery’s exhibition programme in 2012 with the first retrospective of her work in the UK, ‘Big Boys Sit in the Front’.
Liz Gilmore, Director of Jerwood Gallery, says: Chantal Joffe is an inspirational artist, long admired by her peers and critics alike. ‘Beside the Seaside’ shows Joffe in full artistic flight but also reveals her long-standing and very personal relationship with Hastings.
Chantal Joffe beside The Seaside Jerwood Gallery – 31st January to 12th April 2015