Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili's vibrant, symbolic works incorporate manifold particularities. Natural sites, mythological and biblical stories, art produced across cultures, contemporary injustices and personal experiences permeate subjects and scenes, often created over a long period of time, that are abundantly evocative and yet profoundly mysterious. Ofili combines abstraction and figuration, ornamentation and pared-down forms, and flatness and depth in bodies of work that, resisting any singular interpretation, have evolved according to an immanent painterly logic, exploring both representational strategies and art's experiential dimensions.

Richly orchestrated paintings from the 1990s bring rippling dots of paint, drifts of glitter and collaged images together with elephant dung – varnished, often studded with map pins and applied to the picture surface as well as supporting the canvas, combining physical elevation with a symbolic link to the earth. In The Upper Room (1999–2002), its title a reference to the biblical setting of the Last Supper, thirteen paintings line the walls of an intimately lit, chapel-like space. Each iteration of their repeated subject, the rhesus macaque monkey, is governed by a different colour.

Works from the early 2000s that linger on an eternal couple, who dwell in a paradise at once remote and beguilingly within reach, are made in red, black and green. Drawn from Marcus Garvey's Pan-African flag, a symbol of political unity, these three colours radiate from dung balls in the guise of planetary, overseeing forces, imbued with qualities of romantic intimacy and beauty. Paintings and drawings from this body of work were shown at the British Pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennale in a colour-saturated environment born out of their particular atmosphere, beneath the aegis of a kaleidoscopic glass skylight sculpture.

An inward intensity gathers in later paintings, which seem to inhabit the deep, moonlit nights of Trinidad (where the artist has lived since 2005). Dreamlike forms gradually emerge from their velvet depths: Trinidadian Parang musicians playing beside the hanging body of Judas Iscariot in Iscariot Blues (2006); a stop and search incident with sacrificial overtones in Blue Devils (2014) – the blue devils, who annually descend from the Trinidadian town of Paramin during Carnival with a traditional dispensation to behave threateningly, here associated with the 'boys in blue' of the British police force.

In subsequent works, transformative rituals unfold somewhere outside linear time and space. Drawings titled Poolside Magic (2012–2018) feature a recurring, formally dressed figure – sometimes reverently bowing, sometimes upright – whose ceremonial offerings produce a shape-shifting smoke. Elsewhere, works are populated by seductive protagonists inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's Odyssey, or the fertile, mercurial satyr of Greek mythology. In recent drawings and paintings, clouds of particles drift across idiosyncratically imagined, expansive moments of vision – of the desired or remembered – as though seeding fields of possibility.

Attuned to the possibilities of materials and contexts, Ofili continues to pursue varied artistic forms and modes of engagement. His interdisciplinary, collaborative projects include the triptych The Caged Bird's Song (2014–2017), a watercolour landscape hand-woven into tapestry by Dovecot Studios. Other works by the artist, such as the small-scale, veiled Othello - Shroud paintings (spanning 2019–2024) and the shuttered Othello - Reflection watercolours (each 2018–2024) – which explore his ongoing relationship with Shakespeare's Othello and self-portraiture as a movement of imaginative empathy towards the other – invite intimate moments of encounter.

About the Artist

Chris Ofili was born in Manchester, England, in 1968, and lives and works in Trinidad. After completing his Foundation course at Tameside College of Technology he received a BA in Fine Art from the Chelsea School of Art in 1991, followed by an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 1993.

Major presentations of the artist’s work have been staged by institutions including Tate Britain, London (2023–24, 2010, 2005); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2023–24); The Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017–19); National Gallery, London (2017); New Museum, New York (2014–15), travelling to Aspen Art Museum (2015); The Arts Club of Chicago (2010); kestnergesellschaft; Hannover (2006), The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); and Southampton City Art Gallery (1998), travelling to Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (1998), and Serpentine Gallery, London (1998–99).

Architectural and large-scale projects have been commissioned by Tate Britain, London (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017); PEER, London (2016); The Royal Opera House, London (2014); National Gallery, London and The Royal Ballet, London (2012); The Stephen Lawrence Centre, London (2007); Nobel Peace Center, Oslo (2005); and Kent County Council (2002).

Ofili’s works are held in the permanent collections of museums including the British Museum, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town.

The artist represented Britain in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and won the Turner Prize in 1998. He was awarded a CBE for his services to art in 2017.