Chris Ofili

Biography

On 2 October 1999 the exhibition “Sensation”, which had travelled from London by way of Berlin, opened at the Brooklyn Museum. The next day the US House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the museum to be stripped of its municipal funding; the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, spoke out sharply against art of this kind, and the city council withdrew the money. On 1 November 1999 the city’s decision was challenged by Judge Nina Gershon. The main cause of the scandal was Chris Ofili’s painting “The Holy Virgin Mary”, about two and a half metres high: a Black Madonna surrounded by small figures that resemble cherubim and seraphim, except that they are assembled from stills from blaxploitation films, cut-outs from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung.

Elephant dung is a long-standing, constant material for Ofili. In his own words, it is how Africa enters his work.

Ofili was born on 10 October 1968 in Manchester; his parents had come to England from Nigeria. He went to school in Manchester at St Pius X and at Xaverian College, took a foundation course at Tameside College in Ashton-under-Lyne, and then moved to London: in 1988–1991 he studied at the Chelsea School of Art, and in 1991–1993 at the Royal College of Art. In the autumn of 1992 he received a one-year exchange scholarship to the Berlin University of the Arts. That same year a British Council scholarship allowed him to travel to Zimbabwe, and the cave paintings he studied there changed his manner noticeably. His early work shows an interest in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz, Philip Guston and George Condo. At Chelsea, where he was studying, Peter Doig was finishing his graduate work at the same time, and the two became friends.

Recognition came through Charles Saatchi’s exhibitions at his London gallery and through “Sensation”, shown by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. Ofili was one of the few artists of African and Caribbean descent among the Young British Artists. His canvases come together like collage: layers of paint, resin, glitter, cut-outs, and dung, most often elephant dung. His subjects refer to blaxploitation films and gangsta rap, and he mocks racial and sexual stereotypes. Among his best-known works is “No Woman, No Cry”. In 1998 he won the Turner Prize, and in the same year he had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Southampton City Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.

Alongside this, from 1995 to 2005, he painted watercolours about 24 by 16 centimetres, each in a single sitting: mostly heads of men and women, occasionally flowers and birds. In a series he called “Harems”, one man stands with four women on either side of him.

In 2003 Ofili represented Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale with “Within Reach”, a project made together with the architect David Adjaye. “The Upper Room” consists of thirteen paintings of rhesus macaques hung in a specially built room. In 2005 it was bought by the Tate, and the purchase caused controversy: Ofili was at the time a member of the Tate’s board of trustees, and in 2006 the Charity Commission censured the gallery.

He first came to Trinidad in 2000, for a painting workshop in Port of Spain, and in 2005 he moved there for good; his studio is there now. Soon the blue paintings began. They have two sources: the Jab Jab, the blue devils of the Trinidad carnival, and the Expressionist group of German and Russian artists, Der Blaue Reiter. Usually they have a silver acrylic ground with layers of dark oil laid over it. Later versions were shown in 2014 at the New Museum in New York in the exhibition “Night and Day”, Ofili’s first major solo show in the United States. The room was lit so dimly that the eyes had to get used to the darkness before the paintings emerged. It seems to me that this is the best way to look at them: they are, after all, about what is not visible at once. The critic Roberta Smith, the same year, placed him alongside Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Colescott and Ellen Gallagher, and alongside earlier precursors, Bob Thompson, Beauford Delaney and William H. Johnson.

The most extensive exhibition of his work to that date was held by Tate Britain in 2010. In 2017 Ofili was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. “The Holy Virgin Mary” is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which the collector Steven Cohen donated it.