Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili was born in Manchester, England, on 10 October 1968, of Nigerian heritage, and has long made his home and studio in Trinidad. That layered sense of origin — British upbringing, African lineage, Caribbean life — runs through every dimension of his practice, which encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, and large-scale installation. Ofili came to wide attention in the mid-1990s through a body of mixed-media paintings that fused Black popular culture, Catholic iconography, decorative pattern, glitter, and elephant dung into a visual language at once celebratory and confrontational. The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), which incorporates elephant dung, glitter, map pins, and collage, became a flashpoint for debates about racialized representation when it appeared in the landmark Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, drawn from the Saatchi Collection. That same year, Afrodizzia (1996) demonstrated the richness of his material synthesis, while No Woman, No Cry (1998) — now held at Tate — transformed portraiture into an elegy for grief, racism, and Black female resilience, its tear-shaped forms carrying imagery connected to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The Turner Prize followed in 1998, cementing his position as one of the most significant painters of his generation.

The ambition of Ofili's practice deepened considerably in the years that followed. The Upper Room (2002–2005), a cycle of twelve large mixed-media paintings now permanently installed at Tate Britain, London, recast the Twelve Apostles in a sustained meditation on religious and historical painting that stands as one of the most commanding institutional commissions of his career. In 2003 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with the solo presentation Within Reach at the British Pavilion. His major retrospective Night and Day travelled to the New Museum, New York, in 2014 and the Aspen Art Museum in 2015, offering the fullest account to date of his evolving concerns. Solo exhibitions at the National Gallery, London (Weaving Magic, 2017), David Zwirner in New York and Paris, and Victoria Miro in London and Venice have continued to mark the rhythm of his output, most recently Joyful Sorrow (2024) and The Seven Deadly Sins (2023), the latter reviewed extensively in both ArtReview and Frieze. Works by Ofili are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the British Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Ofili was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017 for services to art, and received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of the Arts London in 2004. He is represented by Victoria Miro, London, and David Zwirner, with galleries in New York and Paris. Looking ahead, a solo presentation at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, is scheduled for 2025, and a significant exhibition of new works in dialogue with the permanent collection at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, is set to run from October 2026 through April 2027.