Chantal Joffe paints the truth of memory and motherhood in a new London show

Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover Joffe’s women - because it is often women she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.

Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.

Throughout her career, Joffe has puzzled away at the cyclical nature of family, considering her role as a mother, a daughter and a sister in a series of emotionally-charged paintings which unpick occasionally frazzled, poignant or sensitive dynamics. In Joffe’s paintings, moments in time are captured, frozen and combed over for clues. Work is autobiography – through it, we have watched her daughter, Esme, grow from child to adult, and followed Joffe through sickness and health in a series of unflinching self-portraits.

In 2021’s exhibition, Story, at Victoria Miro, Joffe considered her mother as she aged, from a young mother of three daughters and a son through to an older woman, bandage on eye, recovering from a cataract operation. The details are plentiful – the lace of a nightgown, the stripe of a sofa, the bunny ears of a Halloween costume – and so specific as to, conversely, conjure up a universal experience. Joffe shares the particulars of what has stuck in her memory, generously sharing snapshots so we, the viewers, get to know her mother, our minds then turning to our own.

In a new body of work exhibiting at Victoria Miro in November, Joffe revisits her mother again, now after her death. ‘It has been both difficult and also very moving to me to revisit memory and family in this way,’ says Joffe, who works from photographs, spending time preparing for this exhibition by sorting through a jumble of them in a big box. Mostly, the events were significant enough to capture, yet the meaning of them is lost.

‘Memory is hard to define,’ Joffe adds. She brings structure to its fluid nature, filling in the gaps between events half remembered. In her new work, she criss-crosses narrative and perception, eschewing a chronological retelling of her mother’s life for works which celebrate the everyday fragments. The unexpected moments are highlighted and emphasised, much in the same way memory itself works. The moments Joffe chooses to paint are quiet, the antithesis of the big birthday party or wedding. Joffe’s everyday is filled with cups of tea, walks, books, taking a pause on the sofa or at the kitchen table. ‘Life happens in the everyday,’ she says, simply.

Returning to her mother, now, has been a sharply emotional experience for Joffe. Daryll Joffe has long been a constant in Joffe’s story, a courageous woman who travelled around the globe with her young children, before settling in London and living opposite two of her daughters. ‘My feelings for my mother have been complicated,’ says Joffe on the fluctuating nature of their relationship. ‘But it all changes again after their death.’

Portraying those closest to her comes, of course, with a tangle of issues, springing from memory’s subjective nature. ‘My sisters will get upset about things I can’t predict,’ says Joffe, ‘like how their knees might look’; insecurities stemming from throwaway comments our parents make, which trigger a lifetime of sensitivity, creating a raw awareness of how we are perceived, which we always carry with us. Relationships between siblings, especially, can be particularly close, thorny, sincere and forthright, psychological complexities which always underpin Joffe’s portraits. Viewers recognise the elemental truth of the family dynamics in her works: the power of a parent in youth, to the acknowledgement of their vulnerability as they age, creating a complex, and often not easy, melting pot of emotion.

In Joffe’s work, memory and time cease to exist in the sense we have traditionally understood them, with the past and the future becoming an irrelevance, and leaving us with the memory of human connection as the only certainty. It is an abstract notion Joffe makes tangible in her visceral and very real works. ‘I like very much the Carlo Rovelli understanding of time as being nonlinear,’ Joffe adds. ‘When I’m painting, I have the sense that it’s all a kind of present tense, as if our ghosts are all still here, everywhere all at once.’

Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London from 14 November 2025 to 17 January 2026

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today