Walking into the starkly lit first room of Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate is overwhelming to say the least. Huge paintings propped up against the otherwise blank walls clamoured for my attention: knowing where to start was the immediate challenge.
Even when I’d decided on an individual painting, it was difficult to decide where to focus. The sheer content of the paintings is astounding: layer upon layer, media upon media, the clippings, paint, glitter, and, of course, elephant dung. This is what Ofili has come to be known for, and it’s hard to miss. It protrudes from the Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait where a lump of dung forms one of the woman’s nipples. It makes up the entirety of the sculpture Shithead, a lump of dung smiling crookedly with human milk teeth. Immediately revolting, one can’t help but be amused.
Humour pervades Ofili’s early works. Giant portraits such as Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy collage the faces of black icons, stuck on bare female legs, scuttling in and around the picture with that universal ‘celebrity’ grin that is so numbingly familiar. Race, perhaps the only constant throughout the exhibition, is not above parody: the famous black faces are not all good role models: Tiger Woods grins up from the bottom corner, appropriately balanced on a woman’s thighs.
His subject matter is also profoundly serious. No Woman No Cry, which won Ofili the Turner Prize in 1998, is a portrait of a woman crying tears of collaged pictures of Steven Lawrence, whose racially-motivated murder exposed the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police.
The climax of the show, however, comes in the next room. Led through a dark, wooden hallway, I found myself in The Upper Room, containing a series of twelve profile portraits of monkeys looking towards the central ‘mono oro’, in a reenactment of the Last Supper. The disciples are identified with the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, as the guiding pamphlet helpfully instructs, inviting multi-layered religious interpretations. Whatever these may be, this was a highly compelling climax. These fixed, menacing expressions of the monkeys’ provide intense focus. The glitter of Ofili’s early works is no longer brash and playful, it is alluring. The elephant dung becomes a frame, elevating each portrait.
Out of this vault, I was back in the light, back in an art gallery, and presented with Ofili’s drawings, my personal favourite episode within this varied retrospective. Lively, sexy, and funny, pencilled mini-Afro heads form lines to make bigger patterns – flowers in Afro Daze – or faces in the series Albinos and Bros with Fros. The pencil outlines of the whitened black faces are almost farcical: the black icon in its photo-negative. On the other side of the wall, the black and white outlines are replaced by the voluptuous untitled watercolour series. Crimson red lips and bright blue eyes seem to protrude from the beautiful shapes of the even, dark skin.
What Ofili loses in texture he replaces with colour in the following, final rooms, yet the mood becomes increasingly sober, even sombre. The vast, powerful canvasses look inwards rather than outwards. Faces are covered, avoiding rather than entreating the viewer. The neon colours are shocking and excluding: the clashing yellows, oranges and greens of Rising of Lazurus complicate and dualize the figures. Ofili’s move to Trindad signals a clear change in his painting. The environment envelopes the individual; expression is no longer centred on the person, but their place within a sensual, mysterious setting.
Ofili’s retrospective is energetic, lively, but deeply moody. Profound changes in his work are sensitively reflected by the gallery’s arrangement. Whilst the final figurative rooms are masterful, my fascination was rooted in the earlier parts: the portraits of black men and women, the alluring fierceness of the monkeys. It was this series that, for me, provided the exhibition’s climax. Although the final pictures did not provide a finishing flourish, I look forward to his next output. Who knows what direction it may take?
Chris Ofili is at Tate Britain until 16th May. Admission £10/8.50
