Chris Ofili | |
|---|---|
| Born | Christopher Ofili (1968-10-10)10 October 1968 (age 56) Manchester, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Chelsea School of Art Royal College of Art |
| Known for | Painting |
| Notable work | The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) No Woman No Cry (1998) The Upper Room (2002) |
| Awards | 1998 Turner Prize |
Christopher Ofili,CBE (born 10 October 1968) is a British painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He wasTurner Prize-winner and one of theYoung British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working inTrinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in the city ofPort of Spain. He also has lived and worked inLondon andBrooklyn.[1]
Ofili has utilized resin, beads, oil paint, glitter, lumps of elephant dung and cut-outs from pornographic magazines as painting elements. His work has been classified aspunk art.
Ofili was born inManchester, England, to parents May and Michael Ofili of Nigerian descent.[2] When he was eleven, his father left the family and moved back toNigeria.[1] Ofili was for some years educated at St. Pius X High School for Boys, and then atXaverian College inVictoria Park, Manchester.[3] Ofili completed a foundation course in art atTameside College inAshton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester[1] and then studied inLondon, at theChelsea School of Art from 1988 to 1991 and at theRoyal College of Art from 1991 to 1993. In the autumn of 1992, he got a one-year exchange scholarship toUniversität der Künste Berlin.[1]
Ofili visitedTrinidad for the first time in 2000, when he was invited by an international art trust to attend a painting workshop in Port of Spain.[1] He permanently moved to Trinidad in 2005.[4] In 2002, he married Roba El-Essawy, former singer withtrip-hop bandAttica Blues.[5] They divorced in 2019[citation needed]. He maintains a studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad.[1]
Ofili's early work was heavily influenced byJean-Michel Basquiat,Georg Baselitz,Philip Guston, andGeorge Condo.[1]Peter Doig was doing graduate work at theChelsea College of Arts when Ofili was an undergraduate, and they soon became friends.[1] In 2014, art criticRoberta Smith held that Ofili has much in common with painters likeMickalene Thomas,Kerry James Marshall,Robert Colescott andEllen Gallagher, and with more distant precedents such asBob Thompson,Beauford Delaney andWilliam H. Johnson.[6]
Ofili was established through exhibitions byCharles Saatchi at his gallery in north London and the travelling exhibitionSensation (1997), becoming recognised as one of the few British artists of African / Caribbean descent to break through as a member of theYoung British Artists group. Ofili has also had numerous solo shows since the early 1990s, including at Southampton City Art Gallery. In 1998, Ofili won theTurner Prize, and in 2003 he was selected to represent Britain at the 50thVenice Biennale of that year, where his work for the British Pavilion was done in collaboration with the architectDavid Adjaye.
In 1992 he won a scholarship that allowed him to travel toZimbabwe. Ofili studiedcave paintings there, which had some effect on his style.
Between 1995 and 2005, Ofili focused on a series of watercolors, each about 9½ by 6½ inches and produced in a single sitting.[7] They predominantly feature heads of men and women, as well as some studies of flowers and birds.[8] Ofili's paintings also make reference toblaxploitation films andgangsta rap, seeking to question racial and sexual stereotypes in a humorous way. In a series of faces that Ofili calledHarems, each arrangement consists of one man with as many as four women on each side of him.[8]
Ofili's work is often built up in layers of paint, resin, glitter, dung (mainly elephant) and other materials to create acollage. Though Ofili's detractors often state that he "splatters"[9] elephantdung on his pictures, this is inaccurate: he sometimes applies it directly to the canvas in the form of dried spherical lumps, and sometimes, in the same form, uses it as varnished foot-like supports on which the paintings stand.
Ofili has been founder and prime mover behind the short-livedFreeness Project.[10] 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 10 cities in the UK resulted inFreeness 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 theJab Jab or "blue devils" who participate in theTrinidad and Tobago Carnival, and theExpressionist 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.[11][12] Later iterations of these works were shown at Ofili's solo showChris Ofili: Day and Night atThe 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.[13]
Ofili was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the2017 New Year Honours for services to art.[14] Ofili was included in the2019 edition of thePowerlist, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons.[15]
Ofili's work was featured in a museum in the 1995 exhibitionBrilliant! New Art from London at theWalker Art Center.[16] Significant solo exhibitions include theArts Club of Chicago (2010),Kestnergesellschaft,Hanover (2006), theStudio 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.[17][18] In 2014,The New Museum in New York presented the first, major solo show of Ofili's work in the U.S. titledChris Ofili: Night and Day.[13]
One of his paintings,The Holy Virgin Mary, a depiction of theVirgin Mary, was at issue in a lawsuit between the mayor ofNew York City,Rudy Giuliani, and theBrooklyn Museum of Art when it was exhibited there in 1999 as a part of theSensation exhibition. The painting depicted aBlack Madonna surrounded by images fromblaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung.[19] These were formed into shapes reminiscent of thecherubim andseraphim commonly depicted in images of theImmaculate Conception and theAssumption of Mary. Following the scandal surrounding this painting,Bernard Goldberg ranked Ofili No. 86 in100 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!"[20] The painting was owned byDavid Walsh and was on display at theMuseum of Old and New Art inHobart,Tasmania.[21] Steven A. Cohen then owned it for three years and donated the painting to theMuseum of Modern Art.[22]
The Upper Room is an installation of 13 paintings ofrhesus macaque monkeys by Ofili in a specially designed room. It was bought by theTate Gallery in 2005 and caused controversy as Ofili was on the board of the Tate Trustees at the time of the purchase.[23] In 2006 theCharity Commission censured the Tate for this purchase.
HisOrgena, a glittery portrait of a black woman created by the artist for his Turner Prize-winning exhibit at the Tate in 1998 was sold to an American collector for a record GBP 1.8 million, over its GBP 1 million high estimate, atChristie's London in 2010.[24] In 2015, art collectorDavid Walsh sold Ofili's 8-foot-tallThe Holy Virgin Mary for 2.9 million pounds atChristie's.[25]
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