A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel (2017) is a major public artwork by Chantal Joffe, which spans the platforms of the Elizabeth line at Whitechapel station. Commissioned in 2017 as part of The Crossrail Art Foundation’s public art programme, the installation was initially made as small-scale paper collages and subsequently rendered in laser-cut aluminium. The colourful collages were digitally enlarged to two metres tall and assembled and fixed to the arching platform walls 30 metres below street level.
Artist Portrait. Photo: Isabelle Young
Citing the influence of Matisse and Picasso, Joffe made the work as an evocation of Sunday afternoons spent in the area; the east London neighbourhood portrayed in a series of portraits of passers-by on Whitechapel High Street. A long-time observer of her immediate surroundings, Joffe has lived in east London for many years. She found inspiration for her artwork in the diversity of an area marked, and made, by successive waves of migration.
Chantal Joffe (b. 1969, Vermont, USA) lives and works in London. Joffe completed her studies at Glasgow School of Art and Royal College of Art in London. The artist has exhibited in the UK and internationally since the early 2000s. 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.