Chris Ofili

The recipient of the 1998 Turner Prize, Chris Ofili is one of the most important artists working today. Ofili began to garner attention in the mid-1990s with his intricately constructed works that combine beadlike dots of paint, collaged images from the popular media, and natural, if unusual, materials such as elephant dung. Ofili created a unique iconography that married African artistic and ritual practices with Western art-historical traditions and contemporary hip-hop culture. Throughout his career, Ofili has explored themes of race, birth, death, seduction, and salvation on both a religious and a personal level. His most recent body of work employs Trinidadian myth and folk traditions to reinterpret age-old Christian beliefs. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the full scope of Ofili's artistic development over the last two decades. Extending beyond his painterly practice, the book surveys Ofili's work in watercolor, graphite drawing, and sculpture. Literary and historical parallels from contributors David Adjaye, Thelma Golden, and Okwui Enwezor explore the ways through which the artist has grasped his times with a palpable sense of history and intellectual curiosity.