Tate Britain: Chris Ofili Exhibition

I firstly heard his name because he is one of the most famous alumni of Chelsea.He studied Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art during 1988-1991 then he continued his Masters at Royal College of Art. I can not say I like his works because he's not particularly my type of artist. But looking into his paintings the elements of his early works are really interesting.



Blossom, 1997, Private Collection, all images: © Chris Ofili

While there is much humour in these early works (one of his Captain Shit paintings, featuring a comic book funk superstar, is in the Tate Briain show, as well as Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy, a painting of a giant phallus adorned with a clown face), Ofili didn’t shy away from the politics of race at the time. His work No Woman No Cry, a portrait of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence’s mother Doreen, which includes small photos of her son in the teardrops that spill down her face, remains deeply poignant today. His depiction of women in these works is ambiguous however, with explicit porn imagery shown next to more respectful, and beautiful, images of women such as Blossom (shown top). Ofili’s use of porn imagery, which he says was a direct response to living in King’s Cross in London where he witnessed the street life of prostitutes and pimps, reached its zenith of controversy back in 1999 when Mayor Giuliani complained about his depiction of the Virgin Mary in a painting included in the Sensation exhibition that was showing at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Guiliani threatened to withdraw funding from the Museum for exhibiting the painting, which depicted a black African Mary surrounded by pornographic imagery.

Speaking of the conflicting imagery in his work in an interview with Parkett magazine in 2000, Ofili commented: “It’s about the way the black woman is talked about in hip-hop music. It’s about my religious upbringing, and confusion about that situation. The contradiction of a virgin mother. It’s about the stereotyping of the black female… It’s about beauty. It’s about caricature. And it’s about just being confused.”