The artist's first major museum survey in the United States met with critical acclaim
2014
October 29, 2014 – February 1, 2015
Chris Ofili's first major museum survey in the United States was organized by the New Museum in New York. "For more than two decades," Roberta Smith wrote in her review for The New York Times, "the work of this British artist has dazzled and discomfited, seduced and unsettled, gliding effortlessly between high and low, among cultures, ricocheting off different racial stereotypes and religious beliefs."
The exhibition featured paintings, drawings, and sculptures created in London and, following Ofili's relocation in 2005, in Trinidad. The paintings Ofili made soon after moving to Trinidad are executed in a rich palette of blues. As the artist explained to Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile: "I realized it was more than a color...I had found that if you put silver underneath blue, the blue sits back, like night, or glows like moonlight." These works mark the transition, in Ofili's own words, to "a process of looking that was slower" and account in part for the nocturnal element of the exhibition's title. "That Ofili could cast painting into such a powerful somnambulant fugue state after doing what he'd done so vibrantly for ten years," Jerry Saltz wrote in New York Magazine, "is a testament to his talent and control."
Night and Day also included recent paintings featuring vibrant characters, elements of landscape, and mythical references. Writing in The Village Voice, Christian Viveros-Faune was reminded of art historical precedents, and concluded that these works by Ofili mark the latest stage "in the development of a painter who, as this retrospective amply demonstrates, became a modern master."
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication with texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Night and Day traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado in 2015.