Chantal Joffe’s Pictures of What I Did Not See is a series of ten works, presented together, detailing a period in which the artist fell ill and traumatically lost recollection of events. Speaking about these works, Joffe says, ‘I made these drawings after suffering a concussion, to try and understand what had happened while I was unconscious. I thought if I drew it, I could cope with it better. They are rough and ugly and I made them in kind of frenzy, in oil sticks and pencil and pastel, drawing fast and hard. But they felt very necessary to make – imagining how I had looked curled up on my own doorstep, or with my daughter watching over me afterwards – they felt as truthful as I could make them, and the making of them did help me.’

A selection was shown as part of the artist’s 2020 Arnolfini exhibition For Esme – with Love and Squalor. Reviewing the exhibition, Hettie Judah commented, ‘These are dark works, and intense. The scrabbling clottedness of Joffe’s drawing feels like an exorcism, as if she is willing her memory to yield details of what it keeps hidden. For a devoted mother, it must have been terrifying to suddenly become incapable… Here, beloved daughter cares for helpless mother: no longer looked at but looking after.’

About the artist

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. The acclaimed British painter has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Louisiana, Humlebaek, Denmark; Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, South Korea; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Jewish Museum, New York; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Neuberger Museum of Art, New York. The Artist’s Mother, on view at IMMA in Dublin, Ireland, from March – August 2021, presented works by Lucian Freud of his mother alongside works by Joffe of her own mother. Her recent solo exhibition titled Chantal Joffe: For Esme – With Love and Squalor at Arnolfini, Bristol. UK (2020) captured the changing faces of Joffe and her daughter Esme, moving between mother and daughter and the act of care and being cared for. Her work is in numerous institutional and private collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts; National Portrait Gallery, London; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Joffe has created a major new public work for the Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel, London, which will be on view when the Crossrail station opens in 2022.