North Wales Print Show held at MOMA, New York 1996
1968
Manchester, England
British-African
Christopher Ofili is the first Black British artist to receive the prestigious Turner Prize. He was also one of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a label applied to a group of artists from Britain who began exhibiting together in the late 1980s. Ofili participated in Brilliant! and Sensation, exhibitions that were associated with the YBAs.
He is known for works that utilise resin, beads, oil paint, glitter, lumps of elephant dung, cutouts from porn magazines as painting elements. His work has been classified as `punk art’.
He gained international fame in 1999, when his painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), became the subject of controversy during the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The New York mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, called the painting ‘sick’ because of the use of elephant dung and demanded its removal. The museum resisted Giuliani’s demands, and the exhibition went on as planned.
Since 2005 Ofili has been living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in Port of Spain. He also lives and works in London and Brooklyn.
Ofili was born in 1968 in Manchester, England. When he was eleven, his father left the family and moved back to Nigeria. Ofili was educated at St Pius X High School for Boys, and then at Xaverian College in Victoria Park, Manchester. He completed a foundation course in art at Tameside College in Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, and then studied in London at the Chelsea School of Art from 1988 to1991, and at the Royal College of Art from 1991 to 1993 for an MA in Fine Art. In 1992 Ofili went on a research trip to Zimbabwe, which proved significant to his artistic development. It was there that he first got the idea of using elephant dung as a way of incorporating Africa’s natural environment into his art. While in Zimbabwe, he also saw the ancient cave paintings in the Matobo Hills that had surfaces composed of small dots, a technique Ofili emulated in many paintings. In his art, Ofili deals with issues of Black identity and representation, borrowing from a wide range of references that relate to Black identity and Black culture such as Blaxploitation movies, hip hop, and African material culture. While paintings such as The Holy Virgin Mary, Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997), and Pimpin’ ain’t easy (1997), are steeped in irony and humour, they also confront taboos and comment on issues of representation.
The Holy Virgin Mary
In 1999 his painting The Holy Virgin Mary, was subject of a lawsuit between the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It had been exhibited there as a part of the “Sensation” exhibition. The painting depicted a Black Madonna surrounded by images from Blaxploitation movies and close ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung.[17] These were formed into shapes reminiscent of the cherubim and seraphim commonly depicted in images of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. Following the scandal surrounding this painting, Bernard Goldberg ranked Ofili No. 86 in 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Red Grooms showed his support of the artist by purchasing one of Ofili’s paintings in 1999, even after Giuliani famously exclaimed “There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!”[18] The painting was owned by David Walsh and was on display at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.[19] Steven A Cohen then owned it for three years and donated the painting to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.[20]
Exhibitions
Ofili’s work was featured in a museum in the 1995 exhibition Brilliant! New Art from London at the Walker Art Centre. Significant solo exhibitions include the Arts Club of Chicago (2010), Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2006), the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005), and Southampton City Art Gallery (1998). In 2010, Tate Britain presented the most extensive exhibition of his work to date. In 2014, The New Museum in New York presented the first major solo show of Ofili’s work in the United States titled Chris Ofili: Night and Day.
Chris Ofili has created four series of etchings, each of which consists of ten prints, inspired by a particular trip and they reveal the sensitive, lyrical core of his art. On each trip, Ofili took along a set of copper etching plates and used a different abstract pattern obliquely related to his impressions of the specific place. Calling his project `an odd kind of tourism,’ he used cross-hatching for the first series, Barcelona, in 1992, followed by small dots for Berlin, concentric waves for New York, and diamond patterns for the North Wales prints. The specific sites he visited there are noted at the bottom left of each plate. North Wales (1996) were exhibited at MOMA in New York.
Describing his work on these plates as `nourishing,’ Ofili has said “It can take me to places within myself that are unfamiliar.” While his obsessively drawn, all over patterns are clearly analogous to the decorative fields in his paintings, the small format and spare, repetitive Black markings suggest a process that is more private and introspective.
Ofili has been founder and prime mover behind the shortlived Freeness Project. This project involved the coming together of artists, producers and musicians of minority ethnic groups (Asian and African) in an attempt to expose the music that may be unheard in other spaces. Freeness allowed the creativity of unsigned contemporary British ethnic minority artists to be heard. The result of months of tours to ten cities in the UK resulted in Freeness Volume 1 – a compilation of works that were shown during the tour.
After relocating to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili began a series of blue paintings inspired by the Jab Jab or `blue devils’ who participate in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, and the Expressionist group of German and Russian artists, Der Blaue Reiter. These paintings often employed the use of a silver, acrylic background with layers of dark oil pigment on top. Later iterations of these works were shown at Ofili’s solo show Chris Ofili: Day and Night at The New Museum of New York which were installed in a very dimly lit room, causing viewers to adjust their eyes to the darkness in order to see the paintings.
Ofili was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to art. Ofili was included in the 2019 edition of the Power List, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons.
Success had come at an emotional price for Ofili. “Success can overwhelm you,” he said, “the perception of you can be elevated to such a status that it’s not you anymore. But you start playing you. You have to leave the real you at home because the fake Chris Ofili has been invited to dinner. I was being invited to all kinds of functions and meeting all kinds of interesting people. But I went to very, very few because it was hard to be the person they thought I was. There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.”
In 2002 he married Roba El-Essawy, a singer and songwriter from London hiphop outfit Attica Blues and three years later they moved to Trinidad, where they had two children, a girl called Amel and a boy, Dalil. They kept their house in the English capital and he continues to work in New York and London while based in Trinidad.
His wife told a reporter in 2014 “Chris is the most private person I have ever met. I’m pretty sure that to this day most people here on the island don’t know what he does for a living.”
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490745
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69055
https://www.wikiart.org/en/chris-ofili
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ofili-chris/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ofili-chris/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/chris-ofili-2543
