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Lot Essay
This work has been requested for the upcoming exhibition entitled Public Offerings to be held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art from April 1 through July 21, 2001.
Chris Ofili's painting entitled Popcorn was included in Brilliant!, the aptly named exhibition of New British art at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, in 1995. This exhibition was the first to introduce to the United States most of the names that one associates with the Young British Artist (YBA) generation artists such as Hirst, Lucas, Hatoum, Whiteread and of course Ofili. While not as conceptual as some of his contemporaries, Ofili nonetheless challenged viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. His paintings are slowly and carefully layered with paint, resin, elephant dung and cut-out images of faces and body parts from the pages of magazines devoted to African-American popular culture. He composes these highly varied mediums into his own unique brand of retro-pop primitivism. The resulting works loosely resemble the aboriginal paintings that could be seen in the Australian art gallery on London's Cork street in the early nineties. While Ofili delights the eyes with meticulously executed and brightly colored works, he invites the viewer, by including the printed pages in his work, to consider the background of the creator and of one's own creator.
Chris Ofili's painting entitled Popcorn was included in Brilliant!, the aptly named exhibition of New British art at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, in 1995. This exhibition was the first to introduce to the United States most of the names that one associates with the Young British Artist (YBA) generation artists such as Hirst, Lucas, Hatoum, Whiteread and of course Ofili. While not as conceptual as some of his contemporaries, Ofili nonetheless challenged viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. His paintings are slowly and carefully layered with paint, resin, elephant dung and cut-out images of faces and body parts from the pages of magazines devoted to African-American popular culture. He composes these highly varied mediums into his own unique brand of retro-pop primitivism. The resulting works loosely resemble the aboriginal paintings that could be seen in the Australian art gallery on London's Cork street in the early nineties. While Ofili delights the eyes with meticulously executed and brightly colored works, he invites the viewer, by including the printed pages in his work, to consider the background of the creator and of one's own creator.