Chris Ofili: Joyful Sorrow

“I’ve read Othello many times and have listened to recordings of the text; I’ve seen stage performances and onscreen adaptations, and I continue to discuss it. It doesn’t go away.”

—Chris Ofili in Chris Ofili: Joyful Sorrow

“[Ofili’s work] may at first glance seem more traditional: It is still painting, although its borders are highly permeable.... [His] paintings paradoxically take on an objecthood and gravity that has made some liken them to totems or icons, as if religious references were evoked by the very way the works are crafted, aside from what they portray.”

—Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director, New Museum, New York, in Chris Ofili: Night and Day

“I think the telling of Othello’s story seemed unfinished or rather that it generates endless narratives to be talked about. I felt that Othello was still with us here, very much present, not just as a paradigm but also as an experience.”

—Jason Allen-Paisant in conversation with Darlington Chibueze Anuonye in The Hopkins Review, quoted in Chris Ofili: Joyful Sorrow

“Narratives and themes, however significant for what we ultimately take away, are subordinated in Ofili’s work to the painting.... The paintings work like palimpsests, built up layer on layer: though this does not create the usual effect of an impacted integument of paint but, instead, makes them seem transparent and translucent.”

—Stuart Hall, writer and cultural theorist, in Chris Ofili: Within Reach, 50th Venice Biennale, published by Victoria Miro

“What Chris Ofili reveals in his work is a hand—a soul—that tries to encompass the drama of being in a world filled with beauty and hostility too.... Ofili’s figures stand on their own, daring to be seen.”

—Hilton Als, critic and curator, in Forces in Nature, published by Victoria Miro

“Because he is so clearly in love with Othello, whose power to seduce is given in that he is both impossible to love and not to love, Chris Ofili responds to him by beautifully and brilliantly declining to take responsibility for him. Because of this, Ofili’s portraits of Othello, which somehow incorporate both performative enactment and nonperformative refusal, might open up new pathways in the history of Othello’s portrayal.”

—Fred Moten, professor, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in William Shakespeare 𝗑 Chris Ofili: Othello, published by David Zwirner Books