Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili began to garner attention in the mid-1990s with his intricately constructed works that combined beadlike dots of paint (informed in part by cave paintings in Zimbabwe) with collaged images from the popular media and varnished and adorned elephant dung --that same dung paired with a Madonna that so incensed former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1999 and launched a dramatic series of protests and public outcries. Despite his shifts in material choices, Ofili has remained committed to a painting process that relies on deliberate flattening of the picture plane, carefully layered surfaces, and diffuse sources of inspiration that make for a visually rich iconography and a free-floating vision of a world without hierarchies. Throughout his career Ofili has wrangled with the themes of birth, death, seduction, and salvation, on both a religious and a personal level; his often optically kaleidoscopic visions employ most recently island myth and folk traditions as a means of exploring age-old Christian beliefs and notions.