Viewing Chantal Joffe: The Dog’s Birthday at Skarstedt Paris

British painter Chantal Joffe – a recent Monday Muse at The Wick – has a new solo exhibition at Skarstedt’s Paris gallery, running to May 31. The Dog’s Birthday sees Joffe’s work return to the French capital for the first time since 2001, paintings concerned with domestic duties and the passage of time.

“I made this show,” Joffe has said, “thinking about Paris – about Vuillard in particular and how he painted in apartments his family lived in, and how the family dramas play out against the changing wallpaper and the newspaper reading of the everyday – and how for him colour is tone and tone is everything.’

As well as formal concerns, there is also mourning, grief and a sense of grappling with time in these paintings, that psychological pull that often underscores Joffe’s portraits and self-portraits – several of the latter are also included here. It is an exhibition that gets at the very meaning of painting itself, and its complex relationship with memory and mortality.