Chris Ofili creates intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that deftly merge abstraction and figuration. Ofili rose to prominence in the 1990s for his complex and playful multi-layered paintings, which he bedecked with a signature blend of resin, glitter, collage, and, often, elephant dung. His works—vibrant, symbolic, and frequently mysterious—draw upon the lush landscapes and local traditions of the island of Trinidad, where he has lived since 2005. Employing a diverse range of aesthetic and cultural sources, including, among others, Zimbabwean cave paintings, blaxploitation films, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and modernist painting, Ofili’s work investigates the intersection of desire, identity, and representation.
Born in 1968 in Manchester, England, Ofili received his B.F.A. from the Chelsea School of Art, London in 1991 and his M.F.A. from the Royal College of Art, London in 1993. In 2005, the artist joined David Zwirner, where he has had four solo exhibitions at the gallery in New York.
In 2022, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York presented Chris Ofili: The Othello Prints in conjunction with a year-long festival centering on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Shakespeare-inspired jazz piece. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, for the opening of its new building, commissioned work by Ofili for an extended-run installation, which was on view from 2017 to 2019. In 2017, The National Gallery in London presented Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic, which marked the first time the artist had worked in the medium of tapestry. In the same year, Ofili created a site-specific artwork, incorporating a mural, for Marisol, the newly redesigned restaurant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
In 2015, a group of Ofili’s paintings was included in All The World's Futures, the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, including Chris Ofili: Night and Day, the first major museum solo exhibition of the artist's work in the United States. The show was organized by the New Museum in New York, where it was first presented in 2014, and traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado in 2015.
Other monographic exhibitions have taken place at the Arts Club of Chicago (2010); Tate Britain, London (2010 and 2005); kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2006); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); and the British Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice (2003). In 2017, Ofili was a recipient of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), awarded by the Queen, and in 1998, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize.
The artist’s works are represented in prominent collections internationally, including The British Museum, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Requiem is a major new site-specific work by Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain. The new mural spans three walls and pays tribute to fellow artist Khadija Saye and remembers the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Chris Ofili met Khadija Saye in May 2017 when they were both exhibiting work in Venice, just a month before Saye died in the Grenfell Tower fire. Memories of their meeting had a profound impact on Ofili, and the mural is a journey through an imagined landscape of giant skies with vast horizons and flowing water in which Saye is shown at the center of an energy force high up on the middle wall.
Requiem is located above Tate Britain’s north staircase and will remain on view for 10 years.
Learn more at Tate Britain.
November 19, 2022–April 09, 2023
Step into an immersive experience at the intersection of reality and fantasy worlds. In the Black Fantastic shows seductive, exuberant, and colorful works by eleven contemporary artists from the African Diaspora. With boundless imagination and technical virtuosity, the artists address racism and social inequality while imagining new worlds and possibilities inspired by folklore, myth, science fiction, spiritual tradition, and Afrofuturism.
These artists reshape stories from the past and think about what the future might look like in order to challenge the societal issues of the present. Chris Ofili, for instance, sought out a new version of Homer’s Odyssey. Relocating the classical story to Trinidad, he depicts a Black Odysseus. The Greek hero finds himself entangled in the arms of his lover Calypso, who is portrayed as a mermaid occupying mysterious landscapes. The artist Hew Locke encourages you to look at commemorative statues differently: his equestrian sculptures seem to have escaped from a dystopian landscape. And in her multilayered series of self-portraits, Lina Iris Viktor combines influences from, among other things, classical mythology, West-African textiles, and Aboriginal painting. Discover new narratives and experience the fantastical power of In the Black Fantastic!
The lavishly illustrated English-language catalogue, In the Black Fantastic, will accompany the exhibition. The book includes an introduction by curator Ekow Eshun, and essays by, among others, Kameelah L. Martin and Michelle D. Commander. Through highlighting the artists featured in the exhibition, the book expands on the Black Fantastic as a cultural phenomenon in music, film, and literature.
Learn more at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
October 1, 2022–February 12, 2023
In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of twenty-seven contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, Accra, and Nairobi, In Our Time speaks to the immediacy of this moment on a global scale, as well as the key ideas, narratives, and concerns that artists have been exploring over the past twenty-five years. This selection of forty paintings and works on paper includes a range of styles and approaches, careers from emerging to established, and themes both personal and ubiquitous.
Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) and guest-curated by Allison Glenn, Senior Curator, New York’s Public Art Fund.
Learn more at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
January 20–March 12, 2022
Chris Ofili's twelve Othello prints are presented in conjunction with Such Sweet Thunder—Columbia’s year-long festival of concerts, dramatic presentations, and lectures centering on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Shakespeare-inspired jazz suite. In these etchings, Ofili represents one of Shakespeare’s most complexly moving figures while challenging viewers to see in Othello: The Moor of Venice, aspects of the profound tragedies—racial and otherwise—that plague the world today.
Learn more at Wallach Art Gallery.
August 30, 2020–March 7, 2021
Contemporary Art + Design presents recently acquired paintings, installations, jewelry, furnishings, and design objects. Featuring artists from eleven countries—including artists based in Texas and emerging painters and designers—the exhibition samples new directions for the growth of the DMA’s collection. The painters’ inventive treatments of organic forms show contemporary approaches to landscapes and still lifes. These forms resonate with the unique shapes of the surrounding design works, from experimental and functional sculptures by Ron Arad and Misha Kahn to elegant and whimsical jewelry by Robert Baines, Bruno Martinazzi, Jiro Kamata, and Kiff Slemmons.
January 16–February 22, 2020
The Arts Club of Chicago’s 89th Exhibition of Professional Members took place in January and February 2020. The first exhibition of artist members’ work was held in 1916, the same year that The Arts Club was established. This exhibition featured the work of The Arts Club’s visual artist members, and continues The Arts Club’s long-standing tradition of, and commitment to, furthering the arts. This exhibition included locally, nationally, and internationally esteemed artists, working in a wide variety of media and breadth of historical influences.
The Arts Club of Chicago was founded with the mission to expand the artistic horizons of a public interested in the arts and related activities, and maintains its public galleries—free of admission—for that purpose. Since its inception, and as a part of its mission, The Arts Club membership has included both professional artists and lay members. Throughout its history, The Arts Club has produced significant exhibitions of artists such as John Baldessari, Constantin Brancusi (installed by Marcel Duchamp), Alexander Calder, Peter Doig, David Hockney, Maya Lin, Chris Ofili, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Jackson Pollock, and Auguste Rodin.
Learn more at The Arts Club of Chicago.
An epic live episode of Dialogues. In journeying deep into Homer’s Odyssey in front of an audience at David Zwirner’s 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, lies. Featuring a live reading from Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.
Image: Chris Ofili, Lucas Zwirner, and Emily Wilson at David Zwirner, New York, 2019
Published this month by David Zwirner Books, William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello features twelve etchings by the artist that illustrate Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. Featuring an introduction by the author Fred Moten, the book is part of the Seeing Shakespeare series. Ofili’s recent solo exhibition in New York featured works inspired by Othello, as well as the figure of Calypso from Homer’s Odyssey.
June 8–September 30, 2018
On November 27, 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk—California’s first openly gay elected official—was shot five times. The assassination and its traumatic and charged aftermath were still raw some ten years later when J. Michael Bewley, an employment lawyer in San José, walked into the backroom of a San Francisco gallery and saw Five Times for Harvey (1982), a suite of drawings by American sculptor and painter Robert Arneson (1930–1992) that boldly narrates Milk’s political life and legend. Though unlike the artworks Bewley had been acquiring over the past two years, Five Times for Harvey went home with him and dramatically altered the course of his collecting over the next three decades.
In 2016, Bewley generously donated Arneson’s work to SJMA along with eleven other significant pieces, many of which will be on view for the first time (alongside selections from his personal collection) in Rise Up! These works of art embody the value system of their collector. They explore issues that resonate with current political movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the contemporary LGBTQ movement.
Bold figurative expression of identity unites paintings, prints, sculptures, and textiles by Chris Ofili, Robert Arneson, Sadie Barnette, Squeak Carnwath, Enrique Chagoya, Dorothy Cross, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Lesley Dill, Marlene Dumas, George Grosz, Wangechi Mutu, Tino Rodriguez, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker. Resilience and radicalism resound through these powerful works. Collectively, they issue a call to action—rise up!
Learn more at the San Jose Museum of Art.
"Since he moved to Trinidad, Chris Ofili has absorbed the prismatic colors of the tropics—you can’t not here. But he determined not to traffic, in his work, in the noontime brightness that is its own kind of Caribbean cliché. His most potent works dwell in the blue-black hues of the twelve hours per day when the bougainvillea and creepers are cloaked in dark. Something else that’s caught his eye here are two kinds of cages. One of these is the kind that holds birds—the wire abodes that house Macaws and Picoplats and, especially, rust-bellied finches that adorn porches and whose cages you can see men in sandals toting down the road at dusk. The other kind is meant to contain humans. It’s the form of cage that people have fashioned from and around their homes."
Published in Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost, a new catalogue from David Zwirner Books, this essay by the critically acclaimed author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016) charts the history of chain-link fences. Focusing on a selection of the photographs that helped inspire Ofili's solo exhibition Paradise Lost at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017, Jelly-Schapiro goes on to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.
Read the full essay in The New York Review of Books. Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost is available from David Zwirner Books.
December 1, 2017–June 9, 2019
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) opened the doors to its new permanent home in the Miami Design District on December 1, 2017. As part of the inaugural program Chris Ofili’s newly commissioned, large-scale installation will evolve over the course of its duration. For nearly two years, the artist returned to ICA Miami to make additions to the work, reflecting changes to the artist’s process and perspective over time.
Chris Ofili is renowned internationally for his richly layered works that combine imagery and influences from sources as divergent as comic books, hip-hop, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Biblical scenes, and 1970s-era Blaxploitation films. Since moving to Trinidad in the mid-2000s, Ofili has looked increasingly to the Trinidadian landscape and mythology in order to further reflect upon his long-term consideration of history and identity. His most recent paintings have been animated by figures and scenes from folkloric myths and arguably revisit and revise tropes of modernist painting by artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. Over the last few years, he has also experimented beyond painting through immersive installation works.
Learn more at ICA Miami.
Chris Ofili was invited by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to design an immersive interior, including a large-scale mural, for the newly renovated restaurant Marisol. The restaurant is now open as part of a $16 million renovation of the museum's public spaces.
As The New York Times reported, "The highlight is a new restaurant . . . [The museum] has selected the Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili, who now lives in Trinidad, to create a major site-specific mural for the restaurant, which will be his first permanent museum commission in the United States. 'Really, the entire restaurant is his commission,' Ms. Grynsztejn [Madeleine Grynsztejn, Director of MCA Chicago] added.
June 9 – October 7
Blue Bathers (2014) by Chris Ofili was included in the group exhibition Blue Black at Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
Curated by the American artist Glenn Ligon and inspired by Ellsworth Kelly’s sculpture Blue Black (2000) which is permanently installed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the exhibition explored questions about language, identity, and perception through the lens of these two colors.
As Ligon explained in an interview with The New York Times, "In his [Chris Ofili's] Blue Bathers, the blueness is about Trinidad, where his studio was. Ofili's describing this kind of equatorial light, how in Trinidad even in the darkness there's a luminosity. [That he was] able to capture that in the painting, I thought, was amazing."
The exhibition also included Untitled (policeman) (2015) by gallery artist Kerry James Marshall.
April 26 – August 28
Weaving Magic presentsed an exquisite handwoven tapestry entitled The Caged Bird's Song. The work reflects Chris Ofili's interest in classical mythology and contemporary "demigods" as well as the stories, magic, and colors of Trinidad, where he has lived since 2005. Commissioned by the historic British Clothworkers' Company, the tapestry was made in collaboration with Dovecot Tapestry Studio in Edinburgh. The exhibition also included a series of preparatory works on paper in an installation conceived by the artist for the Gallery's Sunley Room. The tapestry will go on permanent display in the Clothworkers' Hall in London.
Ofili says, "The Caged Bird's Song is a marriage of watercolour and weaving. I set out to challenge the weaving process, by doing something free-flowing in making a watercolour, encouraging the liquid pigment to form the image, a contrast to the weaving process." The Telegraph's review of the exhibition states, "The Caged Bird’s Song is a sumptuous monumental tapestry in which Ofili's painterly skills have been almost miraculously translated into thread to present a lush, limpid scene in which the arcadian landscapes of classical mythology are given a contemporary, tropical twist."
Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, Ofili's previous exhibition at the National Gallery, presented costume and set designs created in collaboration with the Royal Ballet. The project was based on Titian masterpieces depicting stories from Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses: Diana and Actaeon, The Death of Actaeon, and Diana and Callisto.
Read more about Weaving Magic in The Guardian and The Observer.
Chris Ofii has been honoured for his work by being made a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). The news was announced in the Queen's round of honors in April, and the awards given at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in London.
Ofili, who was born in Manchester in northern England and studied in London, is quoted in The Guardian as saying, "We set up our life in England and it’s so special to be recognized for what I do in England and Britain, and for my parents that they made a great choice and invested so much in me. It feels as though I have achieved a lot."
May 9–November 22, 2015
In May 2015, one hundred and twenty years after its first art exhibition, the International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia will unfold once again in the Giardini, the historical grounds where the first event took place in 1895. In 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia will employ the historical trajectory of the Biennale itself, over the course of its one hundred and twenty years of existence. Rather than one overarching theme that gathers and encapsulates diverse forms and practices into one unified field of vision, All the World's Futures is informed by a layer of intersecting Filters. These Filters are a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas, which will be touched upon to both imagine and realize a diversity of practices.
The exhibition aims to investigate how the tensions of the outside world act on the sensitivities and the vital and expressive energies of artists, on their desires and their inner song. Evoking a sense of interiority, a grouping of new large-scale paintings by Chris Ofili hang in a serene, hexagonally shaped temple-like room within the Arsenal. As somber as they are beatific, Ofili’s work captures the enigmatic complexities of our current condition.
For the last two centuries, radical changes have made—from industrial to post-industrial modernity; technological to digital modernity; mass migration to mass mobility, environmental disasters and genocidal conflicts to chaos and promise—have made fascinating subject matter for artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, and musicians. With this recognition, the 56th International Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia proposes All the World's Futures, a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things. Everywhere one turns, new crises, uncertainty, and deepening insecurity across all regions of the world seem to leap into view. How can the current disquiet of our time be properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and articulated?
Learn more at the 56th Venice Biennale.
October 29, 2014 – February 1, 2015
Chris Ofili's first major museum survey in the United States was organized by the New Museum in New York. "For more than two decades," Roberta Smith wrote in her review for The New York Times, "the work of this British artist has dazzled and discomfited, seduced and unsettled, gliding effortlessly between high and low, among cultures, ricocheting off different racial stereotypes and religious beliefs."
The exhibition featured paintings, drawings, and sculptures created in London and, following Ofili's relocation in 2005, in Trinidad. The paintings Ofili made soon after moving to Trinidad are executed in a rich palette of blues. As the artist explained to Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile: "I realized it was more than a color...I had found that if you put silver underneath blue, the blue sits back, like night, or glows like moonlight." These works mark the transition, in Ofili's own words, to "a process of looking that was slower" and account in part for the nocturnal element of the exhibition's title. "That Ofili could cast painting into such a powerful somnambulant fugue state after doing what he'd done so vibrantly for ten years," Jerry Saltz wrote in New York Magazine, "is a testament to his talent and control."
Night and Day also included recent paintings featuring vibrant characters, elements of landscape, and mythical references. Writing in The Village Voice, Christian Viveros-Faune was reminded of art historical precedents, and concluded that these works by Ofili mark the latest stage "in the development of a painter who, as this retrospective amply demonstrates, became a modern master."
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Night and Day traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado in 2015.