New Art Projects has put on a beguiling exhibition of work by painters Jo Chate and Janet Sainsbury. A theme running through the dozen-and-a half canvases on show is the representation of famous faces. In their different ways, both artists have refigured well-known pictures via subversive mimesis, questioning how we see the familiar.
Janet Sainsbury takes as her subject photos of 20th-century artists and writers (Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Amedeo Modigliani, Edvard Munch and others), which she mythologises in a wide range of styles, from modernist to street. Some of the most engaging are Red Lover and Red Whisker, spare faces in pop art style with lurid paint bleeding outside the lines.
In contrast to the humour of Sainsbury’s lightly sketched mouths and eyes, Jo Chate’s austere portraits are stripped bare, bringing out the essential power of the women they depict. Lock In and Senza Ermellino riff on Leonardo da Vinci’s Dama con l'ermellino, with features and creature replaced by swaths of colour. The G Code = The Goddess Code reinvents Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca as a proud Black woman in tight clothing.
Sainsbury works from photos, Chate from mannequins: for both painters copies of copies enable forms of transgression that show us something different in images we thought we knew.
A small quibble: the exhibition has extremely poor signage. A QR code links to the press release, but even the most basic information about individual paintings is lacking.
Jo Chate/Janet Sainsbury: New Paintings
Until 1 August 2026
New Art Projects
357 City Road, EC1V 1LR
