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. 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…’

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. The acclaimed British painter has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including 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. 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 2021.

Currently on view (until 8 August 2021), The Artist’s Mother: Lucie and Daryll, featuring Lucian Freud and Chantal Joffe, is a virtual exhibition presented by IMMA, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, in partnership with Victoria Miro and Vortic, the leading virtual and augmented reality platform for the art world, and hosted on Vortic and at imma.ie. Inspired by two of Freud’s most outstanding portraits of his mother, The Painter’s Mother Reading, 1975, and Painter’s Mother Resting I, 1976, the presentation features an exceptional series of paintings and pastels by Joffe of her mother, Daryll, and will be followed by a gallery display of the pastels in the Freud Centre.