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Chris Ofili: Night and Day review – the boy dung good Chris Ofili: Night and Day review – an artist speaking proudly for himself
(35 minutes later)
Chris Ofili came to prominence very early in his career – so early, in fact, that it might have hurt him. Two years out of art school he had solo shows in New York and London; by 30, he had a Turner prize. Not long after that he had tabloid notoriety, all thanks to intricate, hedonistic paintings incorporating a certain kind of animal ordure.Chris Ofili came to prominence very early in his career – so early, in fact, that it might have hurt him. Two years out of art school he had solo shows in New York and London; by 30, he had a Turner prize. Not long after that he had tabloid notoriety, all thanks to intricate, hedonistic paintings incorporating a certain kind of animal ordure.
There, too often, the story stops. You might need to go back as far as Frank Stella, whose striped canvases appeared at MoMA when he was just 23, to find another painter who hit so big so early, and who remains so thoroughly defined by his earliest work.There, too often, the story stops. You might need to go back as far as Frank Stella, whose striped canvases appeared at MoMA when he was just 23, to find another painter who hit so big so early, and who remains so thoroughly defined by his earliest work.
But there is much more to Ofili than his youthful trials, and his full flowering can be seen in Chris Ofili: Night and Day – a wide and illuminating survey, and the capstone for the best year New York’s New Museum has had since its reopening in 2007. In the years after it moved to its new home on the Bowery, an impractical stack of boxes with serious circulation problems, the Kunsthalle founded by the late, beloved Marcia Tucker lost its way with big, bad displays of commercially friendly white guys, plus a notorious show of one of its board member’s own collections. This year, though, under artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum hit the bullseye again and again with first-rate exhibitions of Camille Henrot, Paweł Althamer and Laure Prouvost, plus an important summer show of Arab contemporary art that no other institution in New York could have mounted.But there is much more to Ofili than his youthful trials, and his full flowering can be seen in Chris Ofili: Night and Day – a wide and illuminating survey, and the capstone for the best year New York’s New Museum has had since its reopening in 2007. In the years after it moved to its new home on the Bowery, an impractical stack of boxes with serious circulation problems, the Kunsthalle founded by the late, beloved Marcia Tucker lost its way with big, bad displays of commercially friendly white guys, plus a notorious show of one of its board member’s own collections. This year, though, under artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum hit the bullseye again and again with first-rate exhibitions of Camille Henrot, Paweł Althamer and Laure Prouvost, plus an important summer show of Arab contemporary art that no other institution in New York could have mounted.
Ofili is the closest to a blue-chip artist among this year’s class. Yet Gioni and his young co-curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Margot Norton, have successfully recast his art in subtler and more somber tones, playing down the shock and pleasure and mapping out his long search to develop a painterly language.Ofili is the closest to a blue-chip artist among this year’s class. Yet Gioni and his young co-curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Margot Norton, have successfully recast his art in subtler and more somber tones, playing down the shock and pleasure and mapping out his long search to develop a painterly language.
This show should belatedly rebalance the public perception of Ofili’s art, which for two decades has been stuck on one leitmotif: the elephant dung he used in his early work. He first conceived of its artistic potential during study in Zimbabwe – although, as the artist and scholar Olu Oguibe has insisted, the country has no tradition of artistic use of animal excrement. Especially in the columns of Britain’s mangier newspapers, the dung figured as an easily broadcast “African” element of the art of a black British painter whose other interests, from William Blake to cave painting to Art Nouveau decorative arts, merited less attention.This show should belatedly rebalance the public perception of Ofili’s art, which for two decades has been stuck on one leitmotif: the elephant dung he used in his early work. He first conceived of its artistic potential during study in Zimbabwe – although, as the artist and scholar Olu Oguibe has insisted, the country has no tradition of artistic use of animal excrement. Especially in the columns of Britain’s mangier newspapers, the dung figured as an easily broadcast “African” element of the art of a black British painter whose other interests, from William Blake to cave painting to Art Nouveau decorative arts, merited less attention.
In fact the dung was never Ofili’s great innovation, and many of his colorful young paintings, especially those depicting his comic book hero Captain Shit, come across today as one-note exercises. They are almost irresponsibly decadent, so ostentatious that they end up lacking force. For a painter starting out they’re not half bad, but if these were all he’d done, Ofili might stand today as just another of the media-confected Young British Artists: a designation Ofili hated, and whose relevance feels as minor today as that of Cool Britannia.In fact the dung was never Ofili’s great innovation, and many of his colorful young paintings, especially those depicting his comic book hero Captain Shit, come across today as one-note exercises. They are almost irresponsibly decadent, so ostentatious that they end up lacking force. For a painter starting out they’re not half bad, but if these were all he’d done, Ofili might stand today as just another of the media-confected Young British Artists: a designation Ofili hated, and whose relevance feels as minor today as that of Cool Britannia.
But two portraits from that era, both of black women, suggested Ofili’s true potential, and they hang (or rather stand, propped against the wall and standing on dung) side by side here in piercing apposition. One is No Woman, No Cry (1998), which depicts the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the young Londoner whose murder set off a two-decade odyssey to prosecute his killers and reform the “institutionally racist” Metropolitan police. The other is The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in which the mother of God floats in a golden frame, wrapped in a shawl of blue and surrounded by clippings of bottoms from porn magazines.But two portraits from that era, both of black women, suggested Ofili’s true potential, and they hang (or rather stand, propped against the wall and standing on dung) side by side here in piercing apposition. One is No Woman, No Cry (1998), which depicts the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the young Londoner whose murder set off a two-decade odyssey to prosecute his killers and reform the “institutionally racist” Metropolitan police. The other is The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in which the mother of God floats in a golden frame, wrapped in a shawl of blue and surrounded by clippings of bottoms from porn magazines.
It’s a big deal to see the latter painting again in New York, because the last time it showed up here, in 1999, then mayor Rudy Giuliani led a disgraceful campaign to censor Ofili and strip the Brooklyn Museum, which was exhibiting it, of city funding. The painting had to be shown behind a sheet of Plexiglas, which was not enough to stop a vandal with white paint. Allegedly it was the dung that upset Giuliani and friends, though one suspects it was really Ofili’s depiction of the Virgin as black. (No matter that western art history is full of dark-skinned Marys, such as the revered Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the holiest relic in Poland.)It’s a big deal to see the latter painting again in New York, because the last time it showed up here, in 1999, then mayor Rudy Giuliani led a disgraceful campaign to censor Ofili and strip the Brooklyn Museum, which was exhibiting it, of city funding. The painting had to be shown behind a sheet of Plexiglas, which was not enough to stop a vandal with white paint. Allegedly it was the dung that upset Giuliani and friends, though one suspects it was really Ofili’s depiction of the Virgin as black. (No matter that western art history is full of dark-skinned Marys, such as the revered Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the holiest relic in Poland.)
They make an extraordinary pair, these two women who’ve lost their sons. Both portraits consist of thousands of meticulous dots, inspired by Ofili’s exposure in the mid-90s to Aboriginal Australian painting, in which the distinction between representation and abstraction does not exist. Doreen (now Baroness) Lawrence appears with her eyes closed, dripping tears that are each affixed with a photo of Stephen’s face, and her necklace has an elephant-dung pendant studded with map pins: a broken black heart. Mary, by contrast, stares straight forward, with eyes as potent as her broad nose and full lips, and the dung hangs from her right breast as an emblem of her motherhood, but also her sexuality. The Holy Virgin Mary is individuated; she is a woman rather than an icon. No Woman, No Cry – the profounder painting, in my book – does the opposite. It makes blackness universal, and renders human love divine.They make an extraordinary pair, these two women who’ve lost their sons. Both portraits consist of thousands of meticulous dots, inspired by Ofili’s exposure in the mid-90s to Aboriginal Australian painting, in which the distinction between representation and abstraction does not exist. Doreen (now Baroness) Lawrence appears with her eyes closed, dripping tears that are each affixed with a photo of Stephen’s face, and her necklace has an elephant-dung pendant studded with map pins: a broken black heart. Mary, by contrast, stares straight forward, with eyes as potent as her broad nose and full lips, and the dung hangs from her right breast as an emblem of her motherhood, but also her sexuality. The Holy Virgin Mary is individuated; she is a woman rather than an icon. No Woman, No Cry – the profounder painting, in my book – does the opposite. It makes blackness universal, and renders human love divine.
Ofili continued his use of dung and dots in his Edenic paintings of lovers in a tropical forest done in red, black and gold. But by 2005, when the artist moved to Trinidad, his art had undergone a substantial transformation – a transformation for the better. The shit was gone. So too was the color. A darkened gallery here, designed by the artist and indebted to Mark Rothko’s chapel in Houston, contains nine large, vertical-format paintings done in an extremely limited palette of navy blue and black. Your eyes need long minutes to adjust to the twilight, and to discern in Ofili’s low-contrast paintings scenes of lovers in tropical bungalows, but also soldiers on horseback and brutalized bodies hanging from trees. The most recent painting, Blue Devils (2014), depicts an act of police brutality but is almost impossible to fully perceive in Ofili’s low light. Night swallows us. Dreams are congruent with waking life, and nightmares too.Ofili continued his use of dung and dots in his Edenic paintings of lovers in a tropical forest done in red, black and gold. But by 2005, when the artist moved to Trinidad, his art had undergone a substantial transformation – a transformation for the better. The shit was gone. So too was the color. A darkened gallery here, designed by the artist and indebted to Mark Rothko’s chapel in Houston, contains nine large, vertical-format paintings done in an extremely limited palette of navy blue and black. Your eyes need long minutes to adjust to the twilight, and to discern in Ofili’s low-contrast paintings scenes of lovers in tropical bungalows, but also soldiers on horseback and brutalized bodies hanging from trees. The most recent painting, Blue Devils (2014), depicts an act of police brutality but is almost impossible to fully perceive in Ofili’s low light. Night swallows us. Dreams are congruent with waking life, and nightmares too.
In the final gallery, against a lustrous royal purple mural of tropical foliage, Ofili wrestles with the tradition of western history painting, and with a modernist legacy that still underlies our visual vocabulary but also essentialized racial difference. Where his early work simply collided high and low, black and white, sacred and profane, art and shit, Ofili now makes more commanding, syncretic images – of the raising of Lazarus, or couples boogying on intricately patterned dance floors – that reject such dualism and thrill to mixing, creolisation, and promiscuity. They’re the work of a much more confident artist, building off the example of Gauguin, Matisse, and his friend and fellow adopted Trini, Peter Doig, but finally speaking only, proudly for himself.In the final gallery, against a lustrous royal purple mural of tropical foliage, Ofili wrestles with the tradition of western history painting, and with a modernist legacy that still underlies our visual vocabulary but also essentialized racial difference. Where his early work simply collided high and low, black and white, sacred and profane, art and shit, Ofili now makes more commanding, syncretic images – of the raising of Lazarus, or couples boogying on intricately patterned dance floors – that reject such dualism and thrill to mixing, creolisation, and promiscuity. They’re the work of a much more confident artist, building off the example of Gauguin, Matisse, and his friend and fellow adopted Trini, Peter Doig, but finally speaking only, proudly for himself.
The three riveting, challenging canvases that close the show, all completed this year, are set at Doig’s film club in Port of Spain, where Ofili has lately been tending the bar. Smoke rises from Martini glasses in sinuous curves that recall Mary’s blue shawl from two decades past; one reveller sprawls in a hammock whose stripes recall the starbursts of his 90s days. But these more difficult and enclosed compositions, incorporating overlaid text and using off-kilter scale, take a lot more work to unpack, and they feature something unprecedented in his art: self-portraiture, in the form of the artist mixing and serving drinks to shadow-strewn clients. Ofili is master and servant, visitor and regular, compere of an island sanctuary where day and night collapse into one. They have nothing to offer the tabloid minimizers who still imagine Ofili sweeping up at the London zoo. Their loss. Because these are the best paintings of his career.The three riveting, challenging canvases that close the show, all completed this year, are set at Doig’s film club in Port of Spain, where Ofili has lately been tending the bar. Smoke rises from Martini glasses in sinuous curves that recall Mary’s blue shawl from two decades past; one reveller sprawls in a hammock whose stripes recall the starbursts of his 90s days. But these more difficult and enclosed compositions, incorporating overlaid text and using off-kilter scale, take a lot more work to unpack, and they feature something unprecedented in his art: self-portraiture, in the form of the artist mixing and serving drinks to shadow-strewn clients. Ofili is master and servant, visitor and regular, compere of an island sanctuary where day and night collapse into one. They have nothing to offer the tabloid minimizers who still imagine Ofili sweeping up at the London zoo. Their loss. Because these are the best paintings of his career.