Chris Ofili *

(born in Manchester in 1968)
Trump, 1998, signed, dated and titled twice Trump 1997–8 Chris Ofili on the reverse, oil, acrylic, polyester resin, glitter, paper collage, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, based on elephant dung, 243.5 x 182.3 x 18 cm
Provenance:
Victoria Miro, London
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above in 1998)

Exhibited:
Southampton, Southampton City Art Gallery, London, Serpentine Gallery, Manchester, The Witworth Art Gallery, Chris Ofili, April 1998 – January 1999
Munich, Museum Brandhorst, Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Painting 2.0: Malerei im Informationszeitalter. Geste und Spektakel, exzentrische Figuration, soziale Netzwerke, November 2015 - November 2016, Munich London 2015, p. 278, p. 150 with full page col.-ill.

Chris Ofili’s atmospheric and enigmatic paintings engage with the intersection of desire, identity and representation. By depicting figures drawn from a wide range of aesthetic and cultural sources within a kaleidoscopic visual language that fuses abstraction and figuration, his works function as sites for journeys of creative transformation. They constitute a baroque-like celebration of the opulence and power of texture and colour: “I try to make [the painting] more and more beautiful, to decorate it and dress it up so that it is so irresistible, you just want to be in front of it” (Chris Ofili, quoted in L. Macritchie, Ofili’s Glittering Icons – Work of Chris Ofili at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, in Art in America, January 2000). With the exuberantly ornamented surfaces of his canvases, Ofili entices the viewer to surrender to their radiance and to revel in their chromatic richness.

"Trump" is an exceptional early masterpiece, executed in 1997–98, a formative period for the artist, during which he committed himself to the depiction and celebration of Black women and became the first Black artist to receive the Turner Prize, awarded by the Tate Gallery in London. The artist grew up in Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when cultural diversity in Britain was on the rise; his personal iconography is therefore imbued with references to ethnicity and Black culture. Hip-hop exerted a profound influence on the emerging multiculturalism that his work inevitably reflects, transposing the urban Black experience into a cultural sphere from which it had traditionally been excluded.

In this early period, Ofili employs collaged and abstracted faces as parodic vehicles for sexuality and ethnicity, drawing inspiration for his female protagonists from Blaxploitation heroines, pornographic imagery and Black Madonnas. Seeking not only to neutralise but to invert the use of the term “spade” (originally denoting a widely played card game in North America, but in twentieth-century American usage also a derogatory term for Black people) through a strategy of “trumping”, the impetus for this body of work was generated by the rhetoric surrounding women in contemporary hip-hop culture. Inspired by the “Spade” series of the African American artist David Hammons from the mid-1970s—who exploited the term’s multiple meanings in order to undermine its negative connotations in relation to Black identity—Ofili sought to reclaim the powerful image of the Black woman.

The Afro-British artist had already articulated his conceptual approach in emphatic terms in 1995: “The paintings themselves are very delicate abstractions, and I wanted to bring their beauty and decorativeness together with the ugliness of shit and make them exist in a twilight zone—you know they’re there together, but you can’t really ever feel comfortable with it.” (Marcelo Spinelli, “Chris Ofili”, in Joan Rothfuss, Kathleen McLean et al. (eds.), Brilliant! New Art from London, exhib. cat., Minneapolis 1995, p. 67)

Through the use of elephant dung as a transient, unstable and ‘impure’ material, Ofili not only establishes a formal counterpoint to the glittering resin surfaces of his canvases, or an intentionally heightened reference to Africa as a point of origin within his artistic framework, but above all challenges entrenched and prevailing boundaries of artistic representation. By adorning his canvases with animal excrement and subverting conventional notions of ‘beauty’, he provocatively calls into question socially sanctioned definitions of art and painting: “Ofili’s paintings rest their bottom edges on elephant turds like cool dudes slouching against a wall watching urban street life go by. Their spirited tone is tongue-in-cheek and full of wit, irony and humour. Assertive images derived from the incongruous worlds of art history, cartoons, pornography, sports and music are radiant with color, glitter, pattern and collage. The results are an elegant synthesis of figuration and abstraction that, combined with his sophisticated use of popular imagery, gender and ethnic stereotypes and clichés, ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a bee’. Their beauty is not about being one thing but about multiplicity – kitsch hangs out with sophistication, beauty plays with ugliness, and the sacred clashes with the profane. Ofili deliberately spars with our prejudices and preconception to create extraordinary complex paintings that push past the point of excess.”
(Director’s Foreword, in: Southampton, Southampton City Art Gallery, London, Serpentine Gallery, Manchester, The Witworth Art Gallery, Chris Ofili, exhib. cat. London 1998, p. iii)