Chris Ofili
Tate Britain, London
The devil, they say, lies in the detail, which is certainly the case with Chris Ofili’s paintings that need close scrutiny to reveal their multi-layered narratives. The subject of this mid-career retrospective, Ofili’s spectacular rise to fame in the 1990s – resulting in him winning the Turner Prize in 1998 – can be followed as he dealt with the perception and representation of the British black experience.
Born the son of Nigerian immigrant in Manchester – both his parents worked at McVitie’s biscuit factory – Ofili discovered his interest in art at a local art school, went on to Chelsea School of Art before studying painting at the prestigious Royal College of Art. A decisive moment came following a trip to Zimbabwe where he visited the prehistoric San caves; here he saw the archetypal depictions of animals and figures using only dots, a technique he adopted for his own work. On safari, he collected elephant dung and stuck it on his canvases – ‘”a way of bringing the landscape into the painting” – combining the colourful and seductive with the unsavoury and, to some, repellent material.
Moving from abstraction, Ofili started to depict the figure in complex, multi-layered compositions that combine the decorative and ornamental with social comment. Calling on a wide range of influences, ranging from the Bible, popular birthday cards, folk art to hip-hop and comics, Ofili’s early paintings burst with colour and life, the surfaces incorporating paint, glitter, resin, map pins and cut-outs from black music and porn magazines. Many of his canvases, leaning against the wall, stand on elephant dung, a reminder of the less congenial part of animal and human existence.
What, however, look at first like exuberant, colourful images that revel in ornamentation are deceptive. A closer examination reveals more challenging, more disturbing detail. The Holy Virgin Mary, for instance, brings together the sacred and the profane, the ideal and the real in disturbing intimacy. Surrounding the central figure are images cut from porn magazines, contrasting the conventional concept of purity and perfection with the depiction of women as sex objects. Although crude, Ofili’s confrontational image is far from pretty and innocent.
Ofili’s painting No Woman, No Cry is equally confrontational. The image of a weeping female head was inspired by the public inquiry into the racist murder of the south London teenager Stephen Lawrence. Ofili was deeply moved by Doreen Lawrence’s overwhelming silent grief at her son’s tragic death in each successive media interview as the case exposed the institutional racism of the Metropolitan Police in bungling the prosecution of the alleged killers.
At the centre of the exhibition is a chapel-like space with the suite of 13 spotlit paintings, The Upper Room, all of which feature monkeys, based on an Andy Warhol collage, each of which holds a chalice. With references to the Last Supper, the series combines aspects of the occult with drugs, sex and money.
Five years ago, following a move to Trinidad, Ofili’s painting became darker and more intense. The textured dots have disappeared, as has the elephant dung and, more conventionally, they no longer lean against but hang on the wall. References to the Bible remain, but are combined with a more sensual approach. Paintings such as The Raising of Lazarus evoke a strange paradise using blocks of vivid colour to develop themes of seduction and salvation. The anger and rage of the earlier work has been replaced by more lyrical, reflective imagery that reflects the quieter life of Trinidad. The fire is still there, but is more diffuse, less in your face.
Emmanuel Cooper
Chris Ofili continues until May 16 and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogu
