Statement
At the centre of Jo Chate’s practice is the exploration of space and how we experience the world we live in, our environment and surroundings. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, and transforming. Starting with photography to capture moments and phenomena from everyday life, she transforms the quotidian to create complex, enigmatic paintings.
Alongside working on paintings Chate experiments with painting on prints, found frames and her own photographs. Working with underpaintings has become part of her methodology often painting over the surface again and again. This formal process is all part of defamiliarising the familiar, absorbing and changing, until the final image evolves incorporating traces from the ones which we can no longer fully see.
Having worked in film and having studied human geography, the environment and our relation to it lies at the core of Jo Chate’s practice. Her landscapes are inhabited spaces, even if they appear empty we can feel the presence of protagonists. Chate paints the landscape as having agency, being dynamic and narrating its own story.
Throughout her making process dance plays a foundational role. Colour and form is created through her perception and the movement of her body. The choreographic physicality in the making of the work creates rhythm and a sense of movement across the canvas. The paintings carry their own internal rhythm.
Jo Chate’s work embraces dualities balancing structure and chaos, mental and physical space, it hovers between the abstract and the figurative. All the elements are fluid and tangible, they conjure and collide with an emotional intensity, resulting in connections and complexities that are not easily definable.
In an attempt to communicate something other than representation, Chate’s paintings go someway beyond depiction or language toward a re-imagining of the world. As the surface is activated translating internal space into visual terms, the paintings ultimately become the site of transformation; refracting and colliding memories with future recollections.
CV
ART EDUCATION
2002 - 2004 Royal College of Art, London. MA in Fine Art Painting (distinction for dissertation)
1999 - 2002 Kingston University. BA Fine Art. 1st class
1998 - 1999 City & Guilds, London. Foundation Diploma
ONE AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2017 NOTES FROM THE WHITE BOOK with Sarah Dwyer, The Perfume Factory, London.
2012 ANGELIS DEFENSA Vicoli Poli popup space, Spoleto, Italy. Solo show during Dei 2Mondi Fesitval
2001 KINKY VISUAL POLLUTION UniLever, Kingston. Solo Show
EXHIBITIONS
2023 OPEN04 Excelsior, London
2023 CUSTARD SPLITS SET London. CURATED
2023 THIS YEARS MODEL 2023 PART III Studio 1.1 London
2023 SIDE STEP SET London
2022 WOMXN - FAIR ART FAIR CURATED II Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop London. Curated by Beth Greenacre and Jo Baring
2021 EUTOPIA Generation and Display, and Excelsior, London. CURATED
2020 HASTINGS OPEN 2020 Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
2020 THIS YEAR’S MODEL ’20 Studio 1.1, London
2018 AN EXQUISIT MESS Pop up space, London
2016 STEWARTS LAW RCA SECRET Royal College of Art, London (also 2012-18)
2013 FIRST COME FIRST SERVED Lion and Lamb Gallery, London
2012 LET THE WORLD SLIP Lion and Lamb Gallery, Turps Banana, London
2011 RCA SECRET Royal College of Art, London (also 2006 – 2010)
2010 ARTWORKSOPEN Barbican Arts Group Trust, London
2008 NEWWORK Gallery Space, Great Western Studios, London
2007 MY PENGUIN 39 Gallery, Mitchell Street, London
2006 HOW WE DWELT IN TWO WORLDS Blyth Gallery, London. CURATED
2005 PECULIAR ENCOUNTERS ecArtspace, London.
2005 ARTFUTURES Bloomberg, London
2005 SYNCOPATIONS Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
2005 ANYWHERE OUT OF THIS WORLD Plattform, London.
2004 22EXHIBITION Ladbrook Hall, London.
2004 THE SHOW Royal College of Art, London. MA show
2004 COMMON GROUND Chambers Gallery, London. CURATED
2003 REDUCED Century Gallery, London
2003 WHO’S HOWIE Royal College of Art, London
2002 14 X 14 Century Gallery, London
2002 SIDEBYSIDEBYSIDE Century Gallery, London
2002 MIXUP New Inn Space, London
2002 TEN DIALOGUES New Inn Space, London
2001 SMALL WORKS The Pump House, London
2001 DAUB Pop up space, London. CURATED
2000 UNTITLED The Loading Bay, London