Victoria Miro is delighted to present new works by Chantal Joffe. Accompanied by an artist’s book with a new text by Olivia Laing, Story features a number of paintings of the artist’s mother and considers issues of aging, motherhood and visibility, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time. The exhibition is the third in a trilogy that began with a year of self-portraits, shown at Victoria Miro in 2019, followed by For Esme – with Love and Squalor, which captured the changing faces across the years of Joffe and her daughter, Esme, on view at Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2020. 

Joffe’s paintings of the artist’s mother, Daryll, are part of an ongoing series that the artist began some three decades ago. These new works, some painted from family photographs, others from life, range back and forth in time. There are depictions of Joffe and her siblings with their mother as children – on a sofa, on a train, on holiday, as newborns and, in the case of Train to Vermont, which shows Daryll pregnant with Chantal, as not-yet-born. As Joffe explains, ‘I suddenly thought, but nobody in their seventies is just that – they’re not just an older person who’s lonely, or isolated, or has health issues… Everybody is the whole life that went before that. So, I started looking at all our family photos and thinking about my mum and all the things she’d done in her life and how she seemed to me when I was a child…’

The Story of the exhibition title refers to a painting depicting the artist and her two older sisters as children in the early 1970s, snuggled up on a sofa with their mother as they share a bedtime story. In the accompanying publication, Olivia Laing writes, ‘What’s remarkable about Joffe’s picture is that she’s managed to plug into a universal current, to capture and convey not just her own childhood, but mine and perhaps yours too.’

Other paintings show Daryll now, alone – standing in her doorway, reclining on sofa after a cataract operation – or accompanied by Joffe, the shifts in dynamic as much emotional and psychological as they are physical but no less palpable. As Olivia Laing writes, ‘Over the years, a kind of hardening takes place, a process of separation and individuation on both sides. It’s not just that everyone gets older, but rather that time occasions a shift in perspective and visibility too. The mother recedes inch by inch, becoming smaller and harder, emerging as a person with needs and sadnesses in her own right…’

Joffe and her sisters, Emily and Natasha, feature in paintings such as Halloween which, drawn from family photographs, convey the complexity of time and memory – the process of the adult looking back entwined with recollections of feelings held as a child at the time. About Halloween, the artist says, ‘I kept thinking how these costumes had all been made for us by my mum and no doubt picked out of a pattern in the sewing shop where we would go. We’d clamour around her: I want to be a bunny, I want to be a dog. My long-suffering mum would take us home, make the costume. She would have had to listen to us all nagging and whining and competing for our costume to be the one that got made. All that came back to me as I tried to paint that. And all the competition between us three sisters.’Fourth Baby is Joffe’s brother, Jasper, whose arrival the artist recalls: ‘I remember him arriving and our excitement about him. And him coming home from the hospital and our disappointment because he was bright red and shouting. We’d had an idea of what a baby would be. And our mum was quite busy taking care of this new screaming red thing. We weren’t so thrilled.’

Painted just before and during the pandemic, the recent paintings on view include Cataract, a painting of Daryll with a bandaged eye following a cataract operation. The motif of the doorway features in paintings large and small. As Joffe says, ‘The paintings of her recently, in the pandemic, are her coming to not even let me in, but to open the door so we can stand in her doorway and talk. It’s such a feature of this time, seeing people against their hallways, peering out.’