Chris Ofili: Night and Day

Publisher: Skira Rizzoli

Publish Date: 2014

Texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s unique lexicon combines African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. Animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili’s most recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist’s vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation.

Image: Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996

Details

Publisher: Skira Rizzoli

Artist: Chris Ofili

Contributors: Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Publication Date: 2014

ISBN: 9780847844562

Retail: $75 US & Canada | £45 | €60

Status: Not Available

Designer: Green Dragon Office, Los Angeles

Printer: Shapco Printing

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 9 x 12 in (22.9 x 30.5 cm)

Pages: 240

Reproductions: Illustrated throughout

Artist and Contributors

Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili (b. 1968) creates intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that merge abstraction and figuration. His works—vibrant, symbolic, and often mysterious—draw upon the landscapes and traditions of Trinidad, where he has lived since 2005. Employing a range of aesthetic and cultural sources, including Zimbabwean cave paintings, blaxploitation films, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and modernist painting, Ofili’s work investigates the intersection of desire, identity, and representation.

Massimiliano Gioni

Massimiliano Gioni is Artistic Director of the New Museum.

Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Minna Moore Ede

Minna Moore Ede is Assistant Curator of Renaissance Painting at the National Gallery, London

Alicia Ritson

Alicia Ritson is Research Fellow at the New Museum

Matthew Ryder

Matthew Ryderis a journalist and barrister at Matrix Chambers in London, England

Robert Storr

Robert Storr is an American artist, critic, and educator who was a curator, and then senior curator, of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture from 1990 to 2002 and from 2005 to 2007. He served as the first American-born director of the Venice Biennale. From 2002 to 2006, he was the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and then dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016, where he remains as a professor of painting and printmaking. The exhibition he organized at David Zwirner in 2013 to celebrate the centenary of Ad Reinhardt was voted “Best Show in a Commercial Space in New York” by the US Art Critics Association.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is an artist and writer based in London. She is best known for her fictive portraits drawn from memory, imagination, and the history of European Painting.

$75