Victoria Miro is delighted to present The Eel, an exhibition of new paintings by Chantal Joffe completed this summer during a residency with the gallery in Venice. 

Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathy, Chantal Joffe’s art is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, and is questioning, complex and emotionally rich. Over the summer, the artist has worked in the gallery’s studio in Venice, completing paintings – self-portraits; paintings of her daughter, Esme; still lifes – against the backdrop of the city at its high-season peak, a place of magnificence, stimulation, pleasure, excess and decay, endlessly toppling into one another.

The exhibition is accompanied by The Spoils, a new essay by Olivia Laing, who writes, ‘How can you paint all this? Put your body in the middle of it and hope to catch a flash as something vanishes or changes state. The only way to walk in the crowd is to submit to its sleepwalker pace, and maybe these pictures are a little like that. Lido, vaporetto, tramezzini on a plate. Everything is gorgeous, everything contains its secret evidence of death.’