Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili, R.I.P. Stephen Lawrence 1974-1993: Contemporary Art

2013

Chris Ofili’s earliest paintings and prints were some of his most radical, breaking boundaries and setting the tone for a lifetime of work that unapologetically explores Black identity, racism, religion and pop culture. 

The Manchester-born artist made a big splash in the art world in the early 1990s, after he visited Zimbabwe at the age of 23. Deeply moved by the region’s Stone Age cave paintings, which incorporated endless (presumably) finger-painted dots, Ofili returned to his studio and infused his paintings with the exuberance of his travels — and with some of the little balls of elephant dung he saw on his trip, which he also found intriguing and brought back to England.

Ofili was a member of the Young British Artists — a collective of London-based artists that included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others that never shied from using non-traditional materials or tackling controversial subject matter. He found the spotlight in the late 1990s when then-New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani publicly criticized the artist’s monumental depiction of an eroticized black Madonna that featured elephant dung and images of female genitalia.

So it was that Ofili became, for a time, best known for his elephant dung paintings. Then, in 1998, at the age of 30, Ofili won the coveted Turner Prize — he was the first Black artist to do so — and soon afterward, in 2003, he was selected to exhibit at the 50th Venice Biennale.

Over the years, Ofili has incorporated other surprising elements into his work, including resin, glitter, beads, oil paint, and pornographic cut-outs — a rich amalgamation of textures and colors, iconography and symbols. He has also found himself surrounded by controversy, as in 1996, when he painted a Black Madonna with elephant dung on her breast, set against a background of genitalia cut out of pornographic magazines. In 2017, Ofili was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in honor of his unusual and thought-provoking contributions to art.

Ofili’s work is held in the collections of some of the world’s most prominent public institutions, including the British Museum in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ofili enjoys ongoing exhibitions at prestigious museums like the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Tate in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, Ofili lives and works in Trinidad.

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