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Lot Essay
Against an enveloping expanse of liquid red brushstrokes emerges Chris Ofili’s Head of an Afronaught (1999-2002). This large-scale canvas incorporates diverse media spanning phosphorescent acrylic, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin and map pins, as well as the artist’s trademark use of elephant dung. A smooth line of green pigment carefully traces the subject’s profile, inviting the viewer to linger on his elegant, elongated neck and pointed beard, to meet his spiky, animate eye with their own, and to revel in his richly mosaiced hair. Two dried, globular lumps of dung—bearing the work’s titular ‘Afro’ and ‘O’ in red, green and black map pins—prop up the large canvas from the floor, while a third intricately embellished orb hangs around the figure’s neck from a beaded chain in the same colours. With this work Ofili renders colour animate and empowered; the Afronaught, adorned with necklace and bejewelled hair, is charged by the bold chromatic scheme of the pan-African flag. Dating to a critically acclaimed period within the artist’s career, the execution of Head of an Afronaught spans the years between 1998, in which Ofili won the Turner Prize for his acclaimed first public exhibition, and the artist’s representation of Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
Ofili’s first visit to the African continent in 1992 would prove transformative for the young artist, born in Manchester to Nigerian parents. He was studying at the time for his MA at the Royal College of Art, London, and travelled to Zimbabwe on a British Council research scholarship. He was transfixed by the elephant dung pointed out by his guide, and by the way—in its variously dried forms—it spoke to the passing of time, the movement of creatures, and the interconnectedness of all natural life. From this point onwards Ofili would incorporate glossy, resin-coated lumps of dung sourced from London Zoo into his canvases. Inspired by prehistoric cave paintings in Zimbabwe’s Matobo hills, he embellished each with small, colourful map pins, pressing them into the dense matter to produce intricate compositions of surprising beauty. In the present work a resin-coated orb of dung, hanging from a beaded chain around the figure’s neck, is embellished with glitter and map pins in jewel-like shades of turquoise, navy and green; at once talisman and fetish object, its effect is strange and alluring, a bringing together of the lowly and the beautiful that speaks to something deeply human.
Head of an Afronaught’s red, green and black palette evokes that of the pan-African flag, originally designed in 1920 with the support of Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), and adopted as a symbol of black nationalism and the African diaspora. Ofili returned to these colours repeatedly in the lead-up to his acclaimed Venice Biennale pavilion of 2003, an immersive installation defined by this tricolore. Subtly but richly textured, across the present work’s surface intricately placed dots of paint become constellations, leading the eye as stars in the night sky. In the foremost portion of the figure’s afro is a euphoric, otherworldly realm: brilliant clusters of painted dots carefully mosaiced atop washy brushes of blue, green and yellow, flecked throughout with glinting shards of polyester. ‘The way I work comes out of experimentation,’ Ofili explains, ‘but it also comes out of a love of painting, a love affair with painting’ (C. Ofili quoted in A. Bonnant, CAP Collection, Dublin 2005, p. 194). In the present work, Ofili evidences this love of paint in the slick, wet strokes of red on black which blanket the background; the effect is a dazzling ocean of unknown depths. Shown in profile emerging from this red abyss, the Afronaught is rendered pan-African icon, recalling figures commonly found on classical medals, coins, and portraits of Renaissance nobility, whose likenesses endure throughout—even collapse—space and time.
In 1994, the writer Mark Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism’ in an essay titled ‘Black to the Future’. ‘If there is an Afrofuturism,’ he wrote, ‘it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points’ (M. Dery, Flame Wars, Durham 1994, p. 182). As elucidated by cultural critic Greg Tate, interviewed for Dery’s text, in the later decades of the twentieth century black visual artists drew on the ‘insertion of black figures into a visionary landscape’ prevalent in contemporary black science-fiction writing (G. Tate quoted in ibid, p. 209). The transposition of the human into a strange or alien realm enacts Dery’s rallying cry for a constellation of far-flung places. In Head of an Afronaught, abstracted swathes of paint along the lower edge suggest a gently rolling landscape under a blood-red sky, as its sole, visionary inhabitant fixes his gaze to the future.
Ofili’s first visit to the African continent in 1992 would prove transformative for the young artist, born in Manchester to Nigerian parents. He was studying at the time for his MA at the Royal College of Art, London, and travelled to Zimbabwe on a British Council research scholarship. He was transfixed by the elephant dung pointed out by his guide, and by the way—in its variously dried forms—it spoke to the passing of time, the movement of creatures, and the interconnectedness of all natural life. From this point onwards Ofili would incorporate glossy, resin-coated lumps of dung sourced from London Zoo into his canvases. Inspired by prehistoric cave paintings in Zimbabwe’s Matobo hills, he embellished each with small, colourful map pins, pressing them into the dense matter to produce intricate compositions of surprising beauty. In the present work a resin-coated orb of dung, hanging from a beaded chain around the figure’s neck, is embellished with glitter and map pins in jewel-like shades of turquoise, navy and green; at once talisman and fetish object, its effect is strange and alluring, a bringing together of the lowly and the beautiful that speaks to something deeply human.
Head of an Afronaught’s red, green and black palette evokes that of the pan-African flag, originally designed in 1920 with the support of Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), and adopted as a symbol of black nationalism and the African diaspora. Ofili returned to these colours repeatedly in the lead-up to his acclaimed Venice Biennale pavilion of 2003, an immersive installation defined by this tricolore. Subtly but richly textured, across the present work’s surface intricately placed dots of paint become constellations, leading the eye as stars in the night sky. In the foremost portion of the figure’s afro is a euphoric, otherworldly realm: brilliant clusters of painted dots carefully mosaiced atop washy brushes of blue, green and yellow, flecked throughout with glinting shards of polyester. ‘The way I work comes out of experimentation,’ Ofili explains, ‘but it also comes out of a love of painting, a love affair with painting’ (C. Ofili quoted in A. Bonnant, CAP Collection, Dublin 2005, p. 194). In the present work, Ofili evidences this love of paint in the slick, wet strokes of red on black which blanket the background; the effect is a dazzling ocean of unknown depths. Shown in profile emerging from this red abyss, the Afronaught is rendered pan-African icon, recalling figures commonly found on classical medals, coins, and portraits of Renaissance nobility, whose likenesses endure throughout—even collapse—space and time.
In 1994, the writer Mark Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism’ in an essay titled ‘Black to the Future’. ‘If there is an Afrofuturism,’ he wrote, ‘it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points’ (M. Dery, Flame Wars, Durham 1994, p. 182). As elucidated by cultural critic Greg Tate, interviewed for Dery’s text, in the later decades of the twentieth century black visual artists drew on the ‘insertion of black figures into a visionary landscape’ prevalent in contemporary black science-fiction writing (G. Tate quoted in ibid, p. 209). The transposition of the human into a strange or alien realm enacts Dery’s rallying cry for a constellation of far-flung places. In Head of an Afronaught, abstracted swathes of paint along the lower edge suggest a gently rolling landscape under a blood-red sky, as its sole, visionary inhabitant fixes his gaze to the future.