Content provided in partnership with

Chris Ofili at David Zwirner

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by David Humphrey

Stylized heterosexual couples, in many of Chris Ofili's new paintings, intertwine on dance floors, enveloped by tropical nightclub atmospheres and, paradoxically, spiritual overtones. Confession (Lady Chancellor)all works 2006 or '07--depicts a magenta nude woman with a halo and orange hair receiving a sacramental cocktail from the brown-skinned hand of a man in a suit, who comes into the picture from above. She is seen from behind and below, her genitals peeking out while extra hands seem to reach both up and down. Refracted in the cocktail is a crisp abstraction that connects sky and hands while promising an evening of intoxicating pleasure.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

In the half-dozen bronze figural sculptures shown, most approximately life-size, the males tend to have dark patinas and rough surfaces while the females are mirror polished. In two cases, the males sprout wings as the couples variously interpenetrate in a burlesque of the Christian Annunciation. Their metal bodies awkwardly exaggerate the opposing qualities of gnarly priapic angel-man and hyperavailable android-woman. The luxe grotesquerie of these sculptures is both a caricature of cheesy fanciness and a wily exercise of Ofili's prerogatives as an international superstar.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ofili's earlier paintings, set on dung-ball feet, had the hieratic authority of giant playing cards; their heavily patterned centralized figures, encrusted with dots of pigment, were carefully sealed under a coat of resin. The new paintings are less protected, more willing to adopt the vulnerable posture of a provisional, easily modified image. They're painted with an unfussy, almost spontaneous directness. In at least five paintings the reanimated Lazarus of Christian myth, with a hard-on, reclines under a tree in the painting's lower right corner. His excited silhouette in The Raising of Lazarus is repeated in three different colors and feminized by wasp-waisted, big-chested proportions. Silver Lazarus shows a naked old man lifting himself from sleep. In another painting, Lazarus seems aroused by a naked woman hidden behind palm fronds. Judas makes an appearance in Iscariot blues, hanging by his neck from a tree.

Consistent with Ofili's earlier work, the new paintings seem more concerned with promiscuous thematic play than edifying sacredness. He lends vitality to traditional subjects with injections of irreverence, suggesting that, like parents, the images can be defiled without losing their status. He complicates a rhetoric of ecstatic immanence with streetwise stylizations and Picabia-like obfuscations about his intentions. These Afro-futurist love gods combine an amped up, hybrid poster art and the abstract mannerisms of contemporary Shona stone carving. Ofili both reverses and scrambles early-20th-century interpretations of traditional African forms, applying Europeanized formal inventions to a variety of more recent Third World pop idioms. The colonial-era borrowings of Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso are borrowed back.

Chris Ofili at David Zwirner

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by David Humphrey

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts