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Chris Ofili | Ofili’s Glittering Icons

Article relating to an individual, 2000
Published by: Art in America
Year published: 2000
Number of pages: 6

image of Chris Ofili | Ofili’s Glittering Icons

Lynn MacRitchie was responsible for a major magazine feature on Chris Ofili, published in the January 2000 issue of Art in America. Lynn MacRitchie, Ofili’s Glittering Icons: The intensely decorative paintings of Chris Ofili are informed by the vibrancy of black popular culture and the reality of British racism, aspects often overlooked in the controversy surrounding his work in “Sensation.” Art in America, pages 96 - 101. The text was extensively illustrated, including three full-page reproductions, one of which was Ofili’s celebrated No Woman No Cry, of 1998. For good measure, the cover of the magazine featured a full page detail of Ofili’s Third Eye Vision, 1999.

From the text: “Chris Ofili’s paintings are joyous things to behold. Dotted with bright pastel colors, layered with shiny varnish, sprinkled with glitter, their surfaces seem to dance and dazzle and shimmer and shine. Some even glow in the dark. Complex, decorative and mostly figurative, they are populated with an ever-increasing cast of characters, both real and imaginary. And, oh yes, they [the paintings] are often presented leaning against rather than hanging on the wall, supported on balls of varnished elephant dung, ythe way that over-stuffed archairs used to rest on carved wood spheres.”

The text repeated the often-told anecdote that Ofili “began to use [elephant dung] after making a six-week British Council-sponsored trip to Zimbabwe in 1992, when he was still a student at London’s Royal College of Art.”

Related people

»  Lynn MacRitchie

Born in Glasgow, date unknown

»  Chris Ofili

Born, 1968 in Manchester, UK