Occupying the Museum’s three main galleries, the exhibition will span the artist’s influential career, encompassing his work in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Over the past two decades, Chris Ofili has become identified with vibrant, meticulously executed, elaborate artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration. In his extremely diverse oeuvre, Ofili has taken imagery and inspiration from such disparate, century-spanning sources as the Bible, hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings, blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems.

His early paintings from the ’90s were created using his signature layering of materials, including paint, resin, glitter, and animal feces, and a diverse combination of iconography. After moving to Trinidad from London in 2005, Ofili’s work took a turn in a new direction, and prompted “The Blue Rider” series, which takes its name from the early twentieth-century artist group who sought spirituality by connecting visual art with music. Composed in dark hues of blue, this series of paintings takes a contemplative approach, recalling the blue light of twilight and the soulfulness of blues music. Ofili’s most recent works have been animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths that resonate with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gaugin.

The exhibition will feature over thirty of Ofili’s major paintings, a vast quantity of drawings, and a selection of sculptures from over the course of his twenty-year career. His hybrid juxtapositions of high and low and of the sacred and the profane simultaneously celebrate and call into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation. Through a series of unexpected connections between his most important bodies of work, Ofili’s exhibition at the New Museum will reflect the vast breadth of his practice.

*image (left)
Chris Ofili,
Afronirvana, 2002.
Oil, acrylic, polyester resin, aluminum foil, glitter, map pins, and elephant dung on canvas, 108 × 144 in (274.3 × 365.7 cm).
Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York/London, and Victoria Miro, London