]]> In exclusive footage filmed inside his studio and during the installation of his new Tate retrospective, the artist reflects on how being in the Caribbean has helped him to find a new fluidity in his painting

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/artist-chris-ofili-beyond-the-tears/1863/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/afro-modern-at-tate-liverpool-jonathan-jones-reviews-a-voyage-of-rediscovery/103/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/afro-modern-at-tate-liverpool-jonathan-jones-reviews-a-voyage-of-rediscovery/103/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:41:53 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/29/afro-modern-tate-liverpool

This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way

Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari, a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpool. And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.

Tate Liverpool seems an apposite place to explore the bleaker aspects of the Atlantic. The museum is contained within the forbidding 19th-century warehouses of the Albert Dock, which speaks more lucidly than any other British setting of the history of the slave trade, documented in detail at the International Slavery Museum nearby.

But Afro Modern is more complex than that. It is inspired by a book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, first published in 1993 by the British cultural critic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy's thesis, reacting against essentialist Afrocentrism, is that black culture's response to the modern world, into which Africans were transported so violently, has been ambivalent. As I understand it – and it is a difficult book – Gilroy believes that although African migration in the 18th century was brutally enforced, the development of black consciousness in the Americas and Britain was never just a rejection of "white" culture, but an engagement with it. Black culture, in other words, has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic – at first in chains, but then willfully and creatively.

Those journeys are well captured by the work of Jacob Lawrence, who was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, created the most important American history painting cycle of the 20th century, The Migration Series. It portrays the journeys of black people from the oppressive south to the northern industrial cities in search of work and freedom. Lawrence's Street to Mbari is the exhilarated, ecstatic, yet composed and detailed record of an outsider's response to Africa. In Lawrence's eyes, Africa is the new world. It is a painting that travels; not a document of "homecoming", but as a record of complex perspectives, of what was gained as well as lost.

The show is more subversive than it first appears. Yes, there are nods to the Harlem Renaissance – notably poems by Langston Hughes illustrated by Aaron Douglas – and documents from the civil rights era, including a telling work by David Hammons in which black faces and hands press desperately at the glass panel of the door to a university admissions office. But here too are works by white artists who were entranced by "the primitive". Picasso's 1909 Bust of a Woman comes from the same period as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shares its deliberately jarring, shocking transformation of a face into a carved wooden African mask.

Man Ray's photograph Noir et Blanche (1926) portrays the famous Parisian avant garde muse Kiki of Montmartre resting her pearl-complexioned face next to a mask from Africa. The picture finds a similarity in the almond shapes of their faces that, too, echoes Les Demoiselles. These images take us to the very heart of the fascination with African art that so inspired European modernists a century ago.

These are artists whose views on race would probably seem highly offensive to us. And not so long ago, an exhibition such as this would have felt obliged to point this out, to provide long wall texts explaining that modern art's "primitivism" was the racist culture of an age of empire. But this exhibition is far more ambivalent: it documents the jazz age dances of Josephine Baker as comic, self-conscious, dramatisations of the kind of fantasy Picasso indulges in Les Demoiselles, with watercolours and magazine photographs that reveal how she became an icon for Parisian artists. It sets a painting of Harlem by the strange British painter Edward Burra alongside jazzy works by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas – the pure shapes of Douglas's murals contrasting with Burra's meaty caricatures.

Near Lawrence's street scene is Constantin Brancusi's abstract sculpture The Blonde Negress (1926): a shining metallic vision of a futurist head that resembles a cross between yet another African mask and a design for a beautiful robot. Brancusi's eroticised, idolised visions of an abstract human form indicate how modernists drew on Africa to invent a utopian model for a new humanity. Elsewhere, a film by the surrealist Maya Deren records Voodoo rituals in 1940s Haiti – the very appearance of which reminds us that no history of the Black Atlantic world can just be aesthetic or art-historical.

One of the best things about Gilroy's book was the way in which it broke up the distinctions between high art and popular culture, and between history and the new, that limit conventional views of modernism. The Black Atlantic discusses JMW Turner's 1840 painting of a slave ship and tells how its bloody sky and sea scattered with flailing African bodies so upset its first owner, John Ruskin, that he sold it. Yet it also discusses how Quincy Jones was influenced by a stay in Sweden in what Gilroy sees as his pivotal role in the reinvention of jazz. Gilroy sees such music as one of the fundamental black contributions to a "counter-culture of modernity".

In the early galleries of Afro Modern, the curators follow this principle, mixing jazz culture and art together – Langston Hughes's poems are modelled on blues lyrics and eerily evoke Robert Johnson, but read with enormous weight and clarity on the page. Yet in the later rooms of the show, recent art is treated in isolation from that kind of larger cultural history. The least impressive room is the 1960s display, whose protest art seems narrow in comparison with the possibilities of 1920s modernism: you simply don't get the same sense of creative dialogue between black and white artists, although Frank Bowling's painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman?, which reinvents Newman's abstract vertical bands in tropical colours and places on them a spectral map of South America, is a highly honourable exception. The last room presents Chris Ofili's painting Captain Shit, with its psychedelic black superhero, whose powerful features suggest Japanese comics. But offering the work in isolation from 1990s hip-hop, whose aesthetic it so clearly shares, is surely a bit po-faced.

In fact, the entire argument about the Black Atlantic seems to dissipate as the show goes on. Only fleetingly does its big themes surface in the contemporary work on display. In Ellen Gallagher's spooky painting Bird in Hand (2006), for instance, which resembles a design for a crazed countercultural remake of Pirates of the Carribean. And there is a hypnotically horrible film by American artist Kara Walker, Eight Possible Beginnings; or the Creation of African-America, in which the history of the US is told by puppets in black-and-white silhouette. They begin in folksy, sickly-sweet nostalgia, but rapidly degenerate into scenes of rape and abuse. I can't count the number of times I have encountered films by Walker in group shows; each time they grow to consume surrounding works. Here is an artist whose sense of history seems to be choking her, and threatens to swallow us.

Outside, rain lashes the pool at the heart of the Albert Dock, out towards the Mersey and the Atlantic beyond. This exhibition is a brave, intelligent – and at its best – transformative encounter with that melancholy ocean and its voyagers.

Rating: 4/5

]]>

This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way

Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari, a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpool. And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.

Tate Liverpool seems an apposite place to explore the bleaker aspects of the Atlantic. The museum is contained within the forbidding 19th-century warehouses of the Albert Dock, which speaks more lucidly than any other British setting of the history of the slave trade, documented in detail at the International Slavery Museum nearby.

But Afro Modern is more complex than that. It is inspired by a book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, first published in 1993 by the British cultural critic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy's thesis, reacting against essentialist Afrocentrism, is that black culture's response to the modern world, into which Africans were transported so violently, has been ambivalent. As I understand it – and it is a difficult book – Gilroy believes that although African migration in the 18th century was brutally enforced, the development of black consciousness in the Americas and Britain was never just a rejection of "white" culture, but an engagement with it. Black culture, in other words, has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic – at first in chains, but then willfully and creatively.

Those journeys are well captured by the work of Jacob Lawrence, who was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, created the most important American history painting cycle of the 20th century, The Migration Series. It portrays the journeys of black people from the oppressive south to the northern industrial cities in search of work and freedom. Lawrence's Street to Mbari is the exhilarated, ecstatic, yet composed and detailed record of an outsider's response to Africa. In Lawrence's eyes, Africa is the new world. It is a painting that travels; not a document of "homecoming", but as a record of complex perspectives, of what was gained as well as lost.

The show is more subversive than it first appears. Yes, there are nods to the Harlem Renaissance – notably poems by Langston Hughes illustrated by Aaron Douglas – and documents from the civil rights era, including a telling work by David Hammons in which black faces and hands press desperately at the glass panel of the door to a university admissions office. But here too are works by white artists who were entranced by "the primitive". Picasso's 1909 Bust of a Woman comes from the same period as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shares its deliberately jarring, shocking transformation of a face into a carved wooden African mask.

Man Ray's photograph Noir et Blanche (1926) portrays the famous Parisian avant garde muse Kiki of Montmartre resting her pearl-complexioned face next to a mask from Africa. The picture finds a similarity in the almond shapes of their faces that, too, echoes Les Demoiselles. These images take us to the very heart of the fascination with African art that so inspired European modernists a century ago.

These are artists whose views on race would probably seem highly offensive to us. And not so long ago, an exhibition such as this would have felt obliged to point this out, to provide long wall texts explaining that modern art's "primitivism" was the racist culture of an age of empire. But this exhibition is far more ambivalent: it documents the jazz age dances of Josephine Baker as comic, self-conscious, dramatisations of the kind of fantasy Picasso indulges in Les Demoiselles, with watercolours and magazine photographs that reveal how she became an icon for Parisian artists. It sets a painting of Harlem by the strange British painter Edward Burra alongside jazzy works by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas – the pure shapes of Douglas's murals contrasting with Burra's meaty caricatures.

Near Lawrence's street scene is Constantin Brancusi's abstract sculpture The Blonde Negress (1926): a shining metallic vision of a futurist head that resembles a cross between yet another African mask and a design for a beautiful robot. Brancusi's eroticised, idolised visions of an abstract human form indicate how modernists drew on Africa to invent a utopian model for a new humanity. Elsewhere, a film by the surrealist Maya Deren records Voodoo rituals in 1940s Haiti – the very appearance of which reminds us that no history of the Black Atlantic world can just be aesthetic or art-historical.

One of the best things about Gilroy's book was the way in which it broke up the distinctions between high art and popular culture, and between history and the new, that limit conventional views of modernism. The Black Atlantic discusses JMW Turner's 1840 painting of a slave ship and tells how its bloody sky and sea scattered with flailing African bodies so upset its first owner, John Ruskin, that he sold it. Yet it also discusses how Quincy Jones was influenced by a stay in Sweden in what Gilroy sees as his pivotal role in the reinvention of jazz. Gilroy sees such music as one of the fundamental black contributions to a "counter-culture of modernity".

In the early galleries of Afro Modern, the curators follow this principle, mixing jazz culture and art together – Langston Hughes's poems are modelled on blues lyrics and eerily evoke Robert Johnson, but read with enormous weight and clarity on the page. Yet in the later rooms of the show, recent art is treated in isolation from that kind of larger cultural history. The least impressive room is the 1960s display, whose protest art seems narrow in comparison with the possibilities of 1920s modernism: you simply don't get the same sense of creative dialogue between black and white artists, although Frank Bowling's painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman?, which reinvents Newman's abstract vertical bands in tropical colours and places on them a spectral map of South America, is a highly honourable exception. The last room presents Chris Ofili's painting Captain Shit, with its psychedelic black superhero, whose powerful features suggest Japanese comics. But offering the work in isolation from 1990s hip-hop, whose aesthetic it so clearly shares, is surely a bit po-faced.

In fact, the entire argument about the Black Atlantic seems to dissipate as the show goes on. Only fleetingly does its big themes surface in the contemporary work on display. In Ellen Gallagher's spooky painting Bird in Hand (2006), for instance, which resembles a design for a crazed countercultural remake of Pirates of the Carribean. And there is a hypnotically horrible film by American artist Kara Walker, Eight Possible Beginnings; or the Creation of African-America, in which the history of the US is told by puppets in black-and-white silhouette. They begin in folksy, sickly-sweet nostalgia, but rapidly degenerate into scenes of rape and abuse. I can't count the number of times I have encountered films by Walker in group shows; each time they grow to consume surrounding works. Here is an artist whose sense of history seems to be choking her, and threatens to swallow us.

Outside, rain lashes the pool at the heart of the Albert Dock, out towards the Mersey and the Atlantic beyond. This exhibition is a brave, intelligent – and at its best – transformative encounter with that melancholy ocean and its voyagers.

Rating: 4/5

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/afro-modern-at-tate-liverpool-jonathan-jones-reviews-a-voyage-of-rediscovery/103/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-retrospective-tate-britain-art-review/391/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-retrospective-tate-britain-art-review/391/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:34:45 +0000 Laura Cumming http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/31/chris-ofili-retrospective-cumming

Tate Britain, London

The retrospective of Chris Ofili's paintings now filling several galleries at Tate Britain is exactly what you might expect – opulent, glittery, dazzling, gorgeous. If you have seen even one of his works you can probably extrapolate the massed effects of 60 more. But what is surprising, and dismaying, about this show is just how indispensable these effects turn out to be when Ofili starts working without them.

An early star, not yet 30 when he won the Turner prize in 1998, Ofili is the most famous black artist in British history. This has nothing to do with the dung. Rudy Giuliani may have accidentally ramped Ofili's reputation by threatening to prosecute the Brooklyn Museum for showing his black virgin propped on dried elephant ordure, but the mayor ought to have observed that this Anglo-African Catholic was applying the identical substance to paintings concerned with slavery. The dung is innocent, evenly distributed. Over here, naysayers were more confused by the references to blaxploitation movies and gangsta rap.

But those days are gone. The controversial works now belong to museums, blue-chip collectors and history itself. Seventies centrefolds, Don King, Ice T, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, all mixed up with racial stereo­types in a manner commonly considered provocative: these look like period pieces of the recent past.

But are they provocative, humorous, ironic? Everything is kept in play. Ofili's even-handedness, anarchic to some, non-committal to others, is so accomplished that one visitor was troubled by the absence of anything to roil the sheer optical pleasures.

The Tate has them in abundance. Here is Ofili's fantastic Afromantic idyll, keyed in the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey's pan-African flag. An Eden of ganja, ripe bananas and heat glowing in a haze of glitter, the paintings are enormous, intricate, abundant, panoramic glorifications of love.

She reclines like an odalisque, a constellation of red and green dots bursting from one nipple like stars. The contours of his body twine with hers: behind, before, above, between, below. The scene pulses with rapture.

The method was laid down almost from the start. Beads, glitter, map pins, sequins, paint used like ink, batik, henna decoration; applied in African cave art dots. Teeming excess and all of it multiplied by the use of resin beneath which images appear suspended as if underwater or trapped in amber – and then Ofili would add another layer by painting on top.

You can see this put to tremendous effect in a work like Spaceshit (1995)with its planetary shapes formed of tiny dots, each semi-transparent so that the painting acquires spacey depths. From a distance, they come across as intergalactic drifts; nearer, they look like Monet waterlilies reprised for modern times and eventually like hard, bright particles. The closer you stand the more there is to see, until you lose sight of the overall picture. Each painting has its own prolific micro-life.

Precise yet stoned, sophisticated yet simple: that is the basic proposition, a dichotomy between the highly disciplined technique and the blatantly swoony effects. You have to wait for the physical appeal to fade (if it ever does) to get down to what is really going on. And most often it seems to be just that: something unresolved, ongoing.

For some, this is Ofili's great strength, this improvisational mix of all and every-thing, like an open-ended poem or song. But it puts everything on the same level. A painting may include afro heads rushing about like fireworks or tiny photographs of the murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence and yet the glorious gaudiness is the main event, the constant. It is not that one painting looks like another, for Ofili has quite a range of effects involving density, motion, brightness, mood; it is more that the tone scarcely varies.

And this is exposed, quite literally, in the recent works painted in Trinidad where Ofili now lives. Almost every distinguishing characteristic has been pared away – layering, resin, glitter and all – to leave nothing but unadorned paint; and images that have nowhere to hide. A couple of islanders strumming banjos in the blue-black night, Judas dangling from a noose apparently added as an afterthought; the raising of Lazarus in the style of Matisse; a deep purple nude accepting a sundowner in what appears to be a stylised cocktail ad.

Ofili experiments with styles, experiments with inky blackness so that one sometimes has to peer into the surface to make out the forms. He makes an obvious verbal/visual pun on Der Blaue Reiter – two ultramarine horsemen in a midnight-blue forest – with Blue Riders. The colours remain rich, but the paintings are crude, mannered, struggling to make anything at all of their chosen content. They feel uniformly powerless and inert.

In the past, it has sometimes seemed as if imagery itself presented a quandary: not so much how but what to paint, hardly an unusual dilemma for an artist. Now Ofili seems to be fixed upon the latter, with these narratives, myths and local scenes, but uncertain with the former. Put politely, it's a bold departure.

But it sends you back to question the past. Did all those proliferating dots, swirls and patterns ever add up? Was it all as playful as people claimed? For answers consult the centrepiece of this show, The Upper Room (1999-2002), with its 13 magnificent panels arranged in a darkened chamber like the figures at the Last Supper.

Each depicts a monkey holding a cup, though the outline of the largest is dissolving in the golden surface, beneath a gilded dung clod of a halo. Each glows, quite literally, with its own luminous colour. Solemn and reverential, yet plainly tinged with the absurd, they keep a tension between monkey business and Bible story that defies explanation.

Rothko claimed that his numinous oblongs represented God; perhaps a monkey can stand in for Christ. Yet that does not seem to be what's going on in this spectacularly intense yet vague installation. The adoration of colour is obvious in each beautifully worked surface, the devotion is all there in the making. This is painting as an act of ­worship.

]]>

Tate Britain, London

The retrospective of Chris Ofili's paintings now filling several galleries at Tate Britain is exactly what you might expect – opulent, glittery, dazzling, gorgeous. If you have seen even one of his works you can probably extrapolate the massed effects of 60 more. But what is surprising, and dismaying, about this show is just how indispensable these effects turn out to be when Ofili starts working without them.

An early star, not yet 30 when he won the Turner prize in 1998, Ofili is the most famous black artist in British history. This has nothing to do with the dung. Rudy Giuliani may have accidentally ramped Ofili's reputation by threatening to prosecute the Brooklyn Museum for showing his black virgin propped on dried elephant ordure, but the mayor ought to have observed that this Anglo-African Catholic was applying the identical substance to paintings concerned with slavery. The dung is innocent, evenly distributed. Over here, naysayers were more confused by the references to blaxploitation movies and gangsta rap.

But those days are gone. The controversial works now belong to museums, blue-chip collectors and history itself. Seventies centrefolds, Don King, Ice T, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, all mixed up with racial stereo­types in a manner commonly considered provocative: these look like period pieces of the recent past.

But are they provocative, humorous, ironic? Everything is kept in play. Ofili's even-handedness, anarchic to some, non-committal to others, is so accomplished that one visitor was troubled by the absence of anything to roil the sheer optical pleasures.

The Tate has them in abundance. Here is Ofili's fantastic Afromantic idyll, keyed in the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey's pan-African flag. An Eden of ganja, ripe bananas and heat glowing in a haze of glitter, the paintings are enormous, intricate, abundant, panoramic glorifications of love.

She reclines like an odalisque, a constellation of red and green dots bursting from one nipple like stars. The contours of his body twine with hers: behind, before, above, between, below. The scene pulses with rapture.

The method was laid down almost from the start. Beads, glitter, map pins, sequins, paint used like ink, batik, henna decoration; applied in African cave art dots. Teeming excess and all of it multiplied by the use of resin beneath which images appear suspended as if underwater or trapped in amber – and then Ofili would add another layer by painting on top.

You can see this put to tremendous effect in a work like Spaceshit (1995)with its planetary shapes formed of tiny dots, each semi-transparent so that the painting acquires spacey depths. From a distance, they come across as intergalactic drifts; nearer, they look like Monet waterlilies reprised for modern times and eventually like hard, bright particles. The closer you stand the more there is to see, until you lose sight of the overall picture. Each painting has its own prolific micro-life.

Precise yet stoned, sophisticated yet simple: that is the basic proposition, a dichotomy between the highly disciplined technique and the blatantly swoony effects. You have to wait for the physical appeal to fade (if it ever does) to get down to what is really going on. And most often it seems to be just that: something unresolved, ongoing.

For some, this is Ofili's great strength, this improvisational mix of all and every-thing, like an open-ended poem or song. But it puts everything on the same level. A painting may include afro heads rushing about like fireworks or tiny photographs of the murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence and yet the glorious gaudiness is the main event, the constant. It is not that one painting looks like another, for Ofili has quite a range of effects involving density, motion, brightness, mood; it is more that the tone scarcely varies.

And this is exposed, quite literally, in the recent works painted in Trinidad where Ofili now lives. Almost every distinguishing characteristic has been pared away – layering, resin, glitter and all – to leave nothing but unadorned paint; and images that have nowhere to hide. A couple of islanders strumming banjos in the blue-black night, Judas dangling from a noose apparently added as an afterthought; the raising of Lazarus in the style of Matisse; a deep purple nude accepting a sundowner in what appears to be a stylised cocktail ad.

Ofili experiments with styles, experiments with inky blackness so that one sometimes has to peer into the surface to make out the forms. He makes an obvious verbal/visual pun on Der Blaue Reiter – two ultramarine horsemen in a midnight-blue forest – with Blue Riders. The colours remain rich, but the paintings are crude, mannered, struggling to make anything at all of their chosen content. They feel uniformly powerless and inert.

In the past, it has sometimes seemed as if imagery itself presented a quandary: not so much how but what to paint, hardly an unusual dilemma for an artist. Now Ofili seems to be fixed upon the latter, with these narratives, myths and local scenes, but uncertain with the former. Put politely, it's a bold departure.

But it sends you back to question the past. Did all those proliferating dots, swirls and patterns ever add up? Was it all as playful as people claimed? For answers consult the centrepiece of this show, The Upper Room (1999-2002), with its 13 magnificent panels arranged in a darkened chamber like the figures at the Last Supper.

Each depicts a monkey holding a cup, though the outline of the largest is dissolving in the golden surface, beneath a gilded dung clod of a halo. Each glows, quite literally, with its own luminous colour. Solemn and reverential, yet plainly tinged with the absurd, they keep a tension between monkey business and Bible story that defies explanation.

Rothko claimed that his numinous oblongs represented God; perhaps a monkey can stand in for Christ. Yet that does not seem to be what's going on in this spectacularly intense yet vague installation. The adoration of colour is obvious in each beautifully worked surface, the devotion is all there in the making. This is painting as an act of ­worship.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-retrospective-tate-britain-art-review/391/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/this-weeks-exhibitions-previews/101/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/this-weeks-exhibitions-previews/101/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:49:18 +0000 Skye Sherwin, Robert Clark, Tim Etchells http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/30/exhibitions-tim-etchells-chris-ofili

Tim Etchells, London

Tim Etchells is best known as the creative director of radical British theatre group Forced Entertainment, a company with a reputation for shows that abuse both the cast and their viewers – from putting on 24-hour performances to players telling audience members they're going to die of cancer. When Etchells isn't directing, he's writing novels, plays for other artists and making his own art. This exhibition compiles further efforts to mix life and art, albeit in a more crowd-friendly way. Included is recent video project Art Flavours, where a master gelato-maker attempts to turn contemporary art categories into something more easily digestible: ice cream.

Gasworks, SE11, Fri to 28 Mar

Skye Sherwin

Afro Modern, Liverpool

Subtitled Journeys Through The Black Atlantic, this exhibition attempts to reassess the pervasive influence of black culture on western modern and postmodern art. Starting from the early-20th century, the influence of African sculptural forms is easily traced in the cubist perspectives of Pablo Picasso. The show goes on to focus on the emergence of black style in street culture and the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s as witnessed in Edward Burra's slinky, expressionist watercolours. But the main thrust comes in gathering together recent work by some of the most influential black artists of the present day – renowned names such as Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, Keith Piper and Ellen Gallagher.

Tate Liverpool, to 25 Apr

Robert Clark

Toby Paterson, Edinburgh

As the geometric severities of classical architectural modernism became increasingly discredited, it was to be expected that fine artists, figureheads of contrary instinct as they inevitably tend to be, would get all interested. Toby Paterson is one of what seems to be an increasing number of artists who have begun to adapt the language of modernist architecture and design to a non-practical, fine art agenda. In wall-based paintings and free-standing sculptural constructions, he pays homage to the compositional rigour of such architects as Denys Lasdun (he of the much-maligned South Bank National Theatre in London). The work is bound to be somewhat reminiscent of earlier generations of British artists who were similarly taken with modernist design: Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore in the 1950s, for instance. Yet Paterson imbues his creations with an almost surreal clinical cool.

Fruitmarket Gallery, to 28 Mar

Robert Clark

Amanda Beech, Bristol

Gleaming chainsaws on a spot-lit mirrored plinth sounds like the kind of sculpture Patrick Bateman might go in for. With this in-your-face centrepiece, artist Amanda Beech sets the scene for a thrill-ride through movie violence. Her belligerently titled video installation, Sanity Assassin, hits you with throbbing noise and hard edges, while her shots of night-time LA are far from peaceful, arranged in music video-style montages and accompanied by rapid-fire captions attacking the culture machine. It's an isolationist position, mirrored in the high-security pads of Hollywood's elite that are lingered over in Beech's footage.

Spike Island, to 11 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Sonia Boyce, Liverpool

Sonia Boyce has always displayed an unusual ability to combine conceptual political issues with a focus on the most personal of emotional trepidations. Her work tends to be created out of a process of what she calls "improvised collaborations". Here, in an exhibition titled Like Love – Part 2, she presents the outcome of work with members of a school for young parents in Bristol and a Liverpool arts centre for adults with learning disabilities. The set-up is reassuringly domestic – wallpaper, printed glass – yet in the superimposed texts, disquieted voices are revealed.

Bluecoat Gallery, to 28 Mar

Robert Clark

Chris Ofili, London

In the late-90s, when Ofili won the Turner Prize, paintings like his black, porny Holy Virgin Mary seemed shocking enough to incite Rudy Giuliani, New York's infamous right-wing former mayor, to threaten a city museum with a cut in funds. Lushly provocative canvases meshing Afro-Caribbean culture with religious and erotic imagery, using bright colour, glitter, resin and his trademark – elephant dung – made him an art star. Yet he has scarcely shown work in the UK since 2002's The Upper Room, depicting a lineup of monkey-apostles in a chapel-like interior. Alongside his career highlights, this Tate survey show boasts recent paintings, inspired by Ofili's new home, Trinidad. Its landscape and mythology fuse in freshly experimental, sensuous work.

Tate Britain, SW1, to 16 May

Skye Sherwin

Michael Landy, London

For the past two months, artists have been donating their work to Michael Landy. Now, he's going to destroy it. Before the day of reckoning, these offerings, sorted and selected by the artist, get their final airing at the South London Gallery. Then, over the next six weeks, works by the likes of Gillian Wearing, Michael Craig Martin, Gary Hume, Rebecca Warren and Landy himself will slowly disappear into a vast "Art Bin". Raising questions about who art belongs to, what makes it valuable and who decides, the bin makes for a comment on the power of art institutions, not to mention perceptions that modern art is rubbish.

South London Gallery, SE5, to 14 March

Skye Sherwin

Basil Beattie, Kendal

Basil Beattie's paintings have always tended to span the abstract-figurative divide. His bold and uncompromisingly painterly images have evoked stairways, ladders and precarious constructions with the most basic of perspective devices. In this recent series, collectively titled Janus II, he turns his eye to archways, doors, windows, the Janus predicament of thresholds, reflective memories and uncertain projections. This – after all, pretty primal, archetypal stuff – is convincingly embodied in Beattie's typical blunt, calligraphic manner. Very much a painter's painter, he is an artist who likes the organic imprecision of the brush mark, implying more suggestive spirit than the most painstakingly delineated graphics. Like deceptively spontaneous, entranced doodlings with a ludicrously oversized and unwieldy brush, the images draw you in to their moody, melancholic and, at times, perkily sanguine depths.

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, to 6 Mar

Robert Clark

• This article was amended on Monday 1 February 2010. Michael Landy's Art Bin is on display until 14 March, not 14 May. This has been corrected.

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Tim Etchells, London

Tim Etchells is best known as the creative director of radical British theatre group Forced Entertainment, a company with a reputation for shows that abuse both the cast and their viewers – from putting on 24-hour performances to players telling audience members they're going to die of cancer. When Etchells isn't directing, he's writing novels, plays for other artists and making his own art. This exhibition compiles further efforts to mix life and art, albeit in a more crowd-friendly way. Included is recent video project Art Flavours, where a master gelato-maker attempts to turn contemporary art categories into something more easily digestible: ice cream.

Gasworks, SE11, Fri to 28 Mar

Skye Sherwin

Afro Modern, Liverpool

Subtitled Journeys Through The Black Atlantic, this exhibition attempts to reassess the pervasive influence of black culture on western modern and postmodern art. Starting from the early-20th century, the influence of African sculptural forms is easily traced in the cubist perspectives of Pablo Picasso. The show goes on to focus on the emergence of black style in street culture and the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s as witnessed in Edward Burra's slinky, expressionist watercolours. But the main thrust comes in gathering together recent work by some of the most influential black artists of the present day – renowned names such as Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, Keith Piper and Ellen Gallagher.

Tate Liverpool, to 25 Apr

Robert Clark

Toby Paterson, Edinburgh

As the geometric severities of classical architectural modernism became increasingly discredited, it was to be expected that fine artists, figureheads of contrary instinct as they inevitably tend to be, would get all interested. Toby Paterson is one of what seems to be an increasing number of artists who have begun to adapt the language of modernist architecture and design to a non-practical, fine art agenda. In wall-based paintings and free-standing sculptural constructions, he pays homage to the compositional rigour of such architects as Denys Lasdun (he of the much-maligned South Bank National Theatre in London). The work is bound to be somewhat reminiscent of earlier generations of British artists who were similarly taken with modernist design: Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore in the 1950s, for instance. Yet Paterson imbues his creations with an almost surreal clinical cool.

Fruitmarket Gallery, to 28 Mar

Robert Clark

Amanda Beech, Bristol

Gleaming chainsaws on a spot-lit mirrored plinth sounds like the kind of sculpture Patrick Bateman might go in for. With this in-your-face centrepiece, artist Amanda Beech sets the scene for a thrill-ride through movie violence. Her belligerently titled video installation, Sanity Assassin, hits you with throbbing noise and hard edges, while her shots of night-time LA are far from peaceful, arranged in music video-style montages and accompanied by rapid-fire captions attacking the culture machine. It's an isolationist position, mirrored in the high-security pads of Hollywood's elite that are lingered over in Beech's footage.

Spike Island, to 11 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Sonia Boyce, Liverpool

Sonia Boyce has always displayed an unusual ability to combine conceptual political issues with a focus on the most personal of emotional trepidations. Her work tends to be created out of a process of what she calls "improvised collaborations". Here, in an exhibition titled Like Love – Part 2, she presents the outcome of work with members of a school for young parents in Bristol and a Liverpool arts centre for adults with learning disabilities. The set-up is reassuringly domestic – wallpaper, printed glass – yet in the superimposed texts, disquieted voices are revealed.

Bluecoat Gallery, to 28 Mar

Robert Clark

Chris Ofili, London

In the late-90s, when Ofili won the Turner Prize, paintings like his black, porny Holy Virgin Mary seemed shocking enough to incite Rudy Giuliani, New York's infamous right-wing former mayor, to threaten a city museum with a cut in funds. Lushly provocative canvases meshing Afro-Caribbean culture with religious and erotic imagery, using bright colour, glitter, resin and his trademark – elephant dung – made him an art star. Yet he has scarcely shown work in the UK since 2002's The Upper Room, depicting a lineup of monkey-apostles in a chapel-like interior. Alongside his career highlights, this Tate survey show boasts recent paintings, inspired by Ofili's new home, Trinidad. Its landscape and mythology fuse in freshly experimental, sensuous work.

Tate Britain, SW1, to 16 May

Skye Sherwin

Michael Landy, London

For the past two months, artists have been donating their work to Michael Landy. Now, he's going to destroy it. Before the day of reckoning, these offerings, sorted and selected by the artist, get their final airing at the South London Gallery. Then, over the next six weeks, works by the likes of Gillian Wearing, Michael Craig Martin, Gary Hume, Rebecca Warren and Landy himself will slowly disappear into a vast "Art Bin". Raising questions about who art belongs to, what makes it valuable and who decides, the bin makes for a comment on the power of art institutions, not to mention perceptions that modern art is rubbish.

South London Gallery, SE5, to 14 March

Skye Sherwin

Basil Beattie, Kendal

Basil Beattie's paintings have always tended to span the abstract-figurative divide. His bold and uncompromisingly painterly images have evoked stairways, ladders and precarious constructions with the most basic of perspective devices. In this recent series, collectively titled Janus II, he turns his eye to archways, doors, windows, the Janus predicament of thresholds, reflective memories and uncertain projections. This – after all, pretty primal, archetypal stuff – is convincingly embodied in Beattie's typical blunt, calligraphic manner. Very much a painter's painter, he is an artist who likes the organic imprecision of the brush mark, implying more suggestive spirit than the most painstakingly delineated graphics. Like deceptively spontaneous, entranced doodlings with a ludicrously oversized and unwieldy brush, the images draw you in to their moody, melancholic and, at times, perkily sanguine depths.

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, to 6 Mar

Robert Clark

• This article was amended on Monday 1 February 2010. Michael Landy's Art Bin is on display until 14 March, not 14 May. This has been corrected.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/this-weeks-exhibitions-previews/101/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/jonathan-jones-was-britart-ever-really-that-good/30/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/jonathan-jones-was-britart-ever-really-that-good/30/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:41:21 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/jan/26/britart-chris-ofili

Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless

So another modern British artist bites ... well, not the dust exactly. But in comparison with the hopes once held for him, the reception of Chris Ofili's new show at London's Tate Britain is flat. Hey, these new works are interesting ... or are they ... hmm, they could be garbage, but we still like him.

I personally find Ofili's new direction intriguing, but I come from a different starting point: I do not think much of his Upper Room cycle or other early works. I did once, but I had a terrible moment of alienation after writing a big raving feature about him then seeing ... well, not much at all in the exhibition I had helped to puff. Ofili is a good and interesting artist, but the fame he won in the late 1990s was overblown and now there is bound to be a correction.

And that puts him in good – or perhaps we need to say so-so – company. The truth is that almost no talent of the British 1990s has endured. All were given a soft ride – and all are landing, with varying degrees of softness, back into the realm of reality. Gary Hume's latest works will be seen not at a snazzy London venue, but the New Art Centre, Salisbury. Damien Hirst ... but I promised to keep silent about him, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, that guy who did the Tube map ... so many have fallen. Gently.

Nor does this mean art is in trouble. Actually things look quite good. I am optimistic that 2010 will see another excellent Turner prize shortlist. There are plenty of good and worthwhile artists to choose from, of all ages. But it is not what we were promised. It is not what seemed possible. It is, actually, business as usual. The dust has settled, and art in Britain in 2010 is much like art in Britain in 1987, or 1977. Interesting, varied, often surprising.

Undoubtedly, we are a nation with something to offer the art world - we always were. But when it comes to the really high stakes the Freuds and Auerbachs have nothing to fear from my generation, and they never did.

]]>

Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless

So another modern British artist bites ... well, not the dust exactly. But in comparison with the hopes once held for him, the reception of Chris Ofili's new show at London's Tate Britain is flat. Hey, these new works are interesting ... or are they ... hmm, they could be garbage, but we still like him.

I personally find Ofili's new direction intriguing, but I come from a different starting point: I do not think much of his Upper Room cycle or other early works. I did once, but I had a terrible moment of alienation after writing a big raving feature about him then seeing ... well, not much at all in the exhibition I had helped to puff. Ofili is a good and interesting artist, but the fame he won in the late 1990s was overblown and now there is bound to be a correction.

And that puts him in good – or perhaps we need to say so-so – company. The truth is that almost no talent of the British 1990s has endured. All were given a soft ride – and all are landing, with varying degrees of softness, back into the realm of reality. Gary Hume's latest works will be seen not at a snazzy London venue, but the New Art Centre, Salisbury. Damien Hirst ... but I promised to keep silent about him, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, that guy who did the Tube map ... so many have fallen. Gently.

Nor does this mean art is in trouble. Actually things look quite good. I am optimistic that 2010 will see another excellent Turner prize shortlist. There are plenty of good and worthwhile artists to choose from, of all ages. But it is not what we were promised. It is not what seemed possible. It is, actually, business as usual. The dust has settled, and art in Britain in 2010 is much like art in Britain in 1987, or 1977. Interesting, varied, often surprising.

Undoubtedly, we are a nation with something to offer the art world - we always were. But when it comes to the really high stakes the Freuds and Auerbachs have nothing to fear from my generation, and they never did.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/jonathan-jones-was-britart-ever-really-that-good/30/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/why-the-best-british-artists-leave/5/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/why-the-best-british-artists-leave/5/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:46:11 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/jan/27/why-british-artists-leave

How can London be the capital of global art when our celebrity culture makes it such a miserable place for artists to live and work?

Chris Ofili, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Britain, is just one of the British artists who have chosen to live abroad to get away from the madness of art's celebrity culture – including such serious figures as Tacita Dean and Steve McQueen.

So here's a paradox. Constantly, the media tell us that London is this century's Manhattan or Paris, that Britain is the world's leading art capital. Yet I believe that in Manhattan in the 1960s you would actually have found artists living and working – and if Picasso had fled back to Barcelona, the Musée Picasso wouldn't have been in Paris. Art capitals are traditionally places where artists thrive. But what kind of artist really thrives on our brand of instant celebrity?

As a critic, you forget what celebrity means. It's seeing people coo over someone who seems very ordinary to me, such as Grayson Perry – someone I've sometimes been rude about, sometimes praised, but certainly never mistaken for the kind of artist I, personally, would go weak at the knees to meet.

Celebrity is such a small thing compared with real fame. For me, a famous artist is one whose works have secured them a true place in art history, whose talent is mysterious and personality elusive. Jasper Johns is famous; Perry is a celebrity.

A celebrity is someone who is "like us" – just watch all those talent shows on TV – which by definition limits their genius. A celebrity, to have democratic appeal, really has to be a bit second rung, a bit ordinary. It's quite a contradiction. You have to catch the eye and yet you can't intimidate people with supreme abilities.

The purest expression of modern Britain's celebrity art culture, and its logical conclusion, was Antony Gormley's participatory artwork on the Fourth Plinth. Here was the mediocrity of the celebrity culture made monumental – everyone an artist, everyone a star, not a trace of imagination in sight.

No wonder the real artists run for their lives.

]]>

How can London be the capital of global art when our celebrity culture makes it such a miserable place for artists to live and work?

Chris Ofili, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Britain, is just one of the British artists who have chosen to live abroad to get away from the madness of art's celebrity culture – including such serious figures as Tacita Dean and Steve McQueen.

So here's a paradox. Constantly, the media tell us that London is this century's Manhattan or Paris, that Britain is the world's leading art capital. Yet I believe that in Manhattan in the 1960s you would actually have found artists living and working – and if Picasso had fled back to Barcelona, the Musée Picasso wouldn't have been in Paris. Art capitals are traditionally places where artists thrive. But what kind of artist really thrives on our brand of instant celebrity?

As a critic, you forget what celebrity means. It's seeing people coo over someone who seems very ordinary to me, such as Grayson Perry – someone I've sometimes been rude about, sometimes praised, but certainly never mistaken for the kind of artist I, personally, would go weak at the knees to meet.

Celebrity is such a small thing compared with real fame. For me, a famous artist is one whose works have secured them a true place in art history, whose talent is mysterious and personality elusive. Jasper Johns is famous; Perry is a celebrity.

A celebrity is someone who is "like us" – just watch all those talent shows on TV – which by definition limits their genius. A celebrity, to have democratic appeal, really has to be a bit second rung, a bit ordinary. It's quite a contradiction. You have to catch the eye and yet you can't intimidate people with supreme abilities.

The purest expression of modern Britain's celebrity art culture, and its logical conclusion, was Antony Gormley's participatory artwork on the Fourth Plinth. Here was the mediocrity of the celebrity culture made monumental – everyone an artist, everyone a star, not a trace of imagination in sight.

No wonder the real artists run for their lives.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/why-the-best-british-artists-leave/5/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-heads-into-the-shadows/11/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-heads-into-the-shadows/11/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:15:22 +0000 Adrian Searle http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/25/chris-ofili-tate

Hip, cool and wildly inventive, Chris Ofili burst onto the scene in the early 90s. Now he's ditching the dung and the glitter, and going some place darker

Chris Ofili's new show is a lesson in learning to be free. Not of the shadows cast by other artists, but of his own. Early success makes some artists grow scared of their shadows; they get so stuck with the thing they have become known for that they are paralysed, ­unable to find a way forward. Ofili, ­instead, has raced ahead. On Sunday he told me that he is letting his new work lead him where it will.

Now in his early 40s, the Trinidad-based British artist recognises that the coherent development of his work isn't something he need worry about. He is centred and confident enough to know that the work will tell the story. At the end of the 1990s, having become ­famous for using his signature elephant dung for some years, Ofili told me he was ­retreating to the studio and staying out of the limelight. By then he had won the Turner prize (in 1998; he was the first black artist to do so), and been vilified by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1999 objected to the Brooklyn Museum of Art showing his black Virgin Mary, replete with dung-balls and clippings of bums and vaginas from porn magazines. But he didn't escape attention or ­controversy: in 2005, Tate bought Ofili's 2002 work The Upper Room, a complex ­installation of 13 paintings in a shrine-like space, ­designed by the architect David Adjaye. Ofili was a Tate trustee at the time.

Ofili has always played with stereo-types of blackness and exaggerated a ribald exoticism in his work. This is ­evident from the start, in the 1993 self-portrait sculpture that greets visitors entering the show – nothing more than a small, misshapen ball of elephant dung, sprouting a few of the artist's shorn dreadlocks, and a smile of milk teeth. The exhibition takes us through the development of his paintings and drawings to the present. Much is missing: where are the balls of dung Ofili put up for sale in Brick Lane market, or the dung spliffs, or the ­"ELEPHANT SHIT" ­stickers he ­plastered London with in the early 90s? Where's the lime-green Ford Capri, the one with the elephant bellow for a horn? More pertinently, where's all the sculpture Ofili has made in recent years, the big-haired and pointy-bearded versions of the caganer, a small defecating figure who appears in Catalonian nativity scenes? The artist has left all this out, wanting to see for himself, instead, the development of his painting, beginning with the 1995 Painting With Shit On It, and ending with rooms of recent paintings with no shit at all. The shit is gone.

Babelicious nudes

There is a huge variety and range in Ofili's art: by turns joky and touching, difficult and sexy. His drawings are wonderfully erotic, lively and funny. Along the way, Ofili gets more dense and florid and complex, and then – bit by bit – jettisons the things that made him famous: the dung, the glitter, the multi-coloured, pasted-on genitalia and afro heads. Get up close to his earlier paintings – the surfaces encourage it, catching the light and writhing with life – and you lose yourself in the visual riffs, the art-nouveauish riots of plant life, the chains of dots and blobs, the beats and pulses and beads of colour. It's like listening to multi-layered ­music on headphones, and being ­delayed by all the detail.

Stepping back, it is not only your focus that shifts. On top of the fractal grids, the foliage and ripples, lumps of dung thud on the surface. Some of these are mad heads with cheeky, map-pin grins and all-seeing spooky eyes. Others are engorged cocks ­drooping under their own weight, breasts and – well – lumps of dung. This visual ­music is structured and held in check by ­pattern and order, by Ofili's larger ­motifs and images. There is his ­stupid blacktastic superhero Captain Shit; there are babelicious nudes with startled eyes and knowing smiles, and the ­beautiful and affecting No Woman, No Cry – Ofili's homage to murdered ­London teenager Stephen Lawrence.

From the beginning, Ofili looked cool and hip and outrageously novel. More than a decade on, some of his ­earlier work looks temporarily dated – or at least stalled by the Cool Britannia 90s euphoria for new British art. This will fall away with time. Late in the show, the tempo slows and the light goes out, both in the gallery and in the paintings. The walls are a sombre grey, the paintings hard to read. Their surfaces are thinly washed and layered in nuanced, dark blues. No matter how much you adjust to the gloom, they ­resist the eye. The thinner the paint, the more mysterious and impalpable the images are. Things hover in blue twilight: a dead deer strung up in a forest; soldiers riding through trees; two men making music on a wooden platform, a stage that turns out to be a scaffold. While they play, a hanged man dangles naked beside them. I hear imaginary night airs, a lament to the body hanging there. Why is he there?

Ofili has told one interviewer that this presence was provoked by the empty space he had left on the right-hand side of the painting. But it is hard not to think of some colonial outrage, its aftermath on a hot night. What one cannot see – things in the muzzy blue-green dark, a back-story the paintings might and might not tell – becomes all the more tantalising. I fill the paintings up with my own imaginings, and sit on the floor looking into the near-dark for a long time, among paintings that refuse as much as they bewitch. In Ofili's early work, we lost ourselves in stoned, close-focus detail. Now, we're lost among things unseen.

In dangerous territory

The last room bursts into light again. These paintings are hard to read, too. There is ­Lazarus being raised, his body floppy, his cock rising with him in an erection. In ­another painting, a naked woman (red hair, red labia), takes a drink from a waiter. She seems to have a halo. Elsewhere, there are figures emerging and disappearing into darkness or just trailing off – unpainted, half-seen and unaccountable. Maybe the artist can't account for them either.

In a painting called The Healer, a squatting figure gorges or vomits yellow fruit. The ­symbolism ­escapes me. These paintings are ­uncompromisingly difficult. This is dangerous territory, and some of Ofili's recent paintings ­received a mixed ­reception when they were first shown in New York last year. They feel ­transitional, in themselves and in terms of where they're headed: sometimes what first ­appears as ­mystery or open-­endedness turns out to be a lack of resolution. But when they work – and The Healer does, ­whatever it might mean – they really work. Ofili's ­confidence carries it.

Until the 90s, there were hardly any black students at British art colleges. Ofili's success showed that, if you have the intelligence, savvy and ­ambition, being an artist is a career option. Someone has to pave the way. And it was clear from the first not just how ambitious Ofili was, but how individual his take on painting was – once he'd ditched his student style of narrative figuration (funny how things make their return, and are never ­entirely lost). Rather than living up to his reputation, he is now more concerned to push his art forward. One of Ofili's earlier solo shows was called Freedom One Day: let's see where freedom leads him.

]]>

Hip, cool and wildly inventive, Chris Ofili burst onto the scene in the early 90s. Now he's ditching the dung and the glitter, and going some place darker

Chris Ofili's new show is a lesson in learning to be free. Not of the shadows cast by other artists, but of his own. Early success makes some artists grow scared of their shadows; they get so stuck with the thing they have become known for that they are paralysed, ­unable to find a way forward. Ofili, ­instead, has raced ahead. On Sunday he told me that he is letting his new work lead him where it will.

Now in his early 40s, the Trinidad-based British artist recognises that the coherent development of his work isn't something he need worry about. He is centred and confident enough to know that the work will tell the story. At the end of the 1990s, having become ­famous for using his signature elephant dung for some years, Ofili told me he was ­retreating to the studio and staying out of the limelight. By then he had won the Turner prize (in 1998; he was the first black artist to do so), and been vilified by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1999 objected to the Brooklyn Museum of Art showing his black Virgin Mary, replete with dung-balls and clippings of bums and vaginas from porn magazines. But he didn't escape attention or ­controversy: in 2005, Tate bought Ofili's 2002 work The Upper Room, a complex ­installation of 13 paintings in a shrine-like space, ­designed by the architect David Adjaye. Ofili was a Tate trustee at the time.

Ofili has always played with stereo-types of blackness and exaggerated a ribald exoticism in his work. This is ­evident from the start, in the 1993 self-portrait sculpture that greets visitors entering the show – nothing more than a small, misshapen ball of elephant dung, sprouting a few of the artist's shorn dreadlocks, and a smile of milk teeth. The exhibition takes us through the development of his paintings and drawings to the present. Much is missing: where are the balls of dung Ofili put up for sale in Brick Lane market, or the dung spliffs, or the ­"ELEPHANT SHIT" ­stickers he ­plastered London with in the early 90s? Where's the lime-green Ford Capri, the one with the elephant bellow for a horn? More pertinently, where's all the sculpture Ofili has made in recent years, the big-haired and pointy-bearded versions of the caganer, a small defecating figure who appears in Catalonian nativity scenes? The artist has left all this out, wanting to see for himself, instead, the development of his painting, beginning with the 1995 Painting With Shit On It, and ending with rooms of recent paintings with no shit at all. The shit is gone.

Babelicious nudes

There is a huge variety and range in Ofili's art: by turns joky and touching, difficult and sexy. His drawings are wonderfully erotic, lively and funny. Along the way, Ofili gets more dense and florid and complex, and then – bit by bit – jettisons the things that made him famous: the dung, the glitter, the multi-coloured, pasted-on genitalia and afro heads. Get up close to his earlier paintings – the surfaces encourage it, catching the light and writhing with life – and you lose yourself in the visual riffs, the art-nouveauish riots of plant life, the chains of dots and blobs, the beats and pulses and beads of colour. It's like listening to multi-layered ­music on headphones, and being ­delayed by all the detail.

Stepping back, it is not only your focus that shifts. On top of the fractal grids, the foliage and ripples, lumps of dung thud on the surface. Some of these are mad heads with cheeky, map-pin grins and all-seeing spooky eyes. Others are engorged cocks ­drooping under their own weight, breasts and – well – lumps of dung. This visual ­music is structured and held in check by ­pattern and order, by Ofili's larger ­motifs and images. There is his ­stupid blacktastic superhero Captain Shit; there are babelicious nudes with startled eyes and knowing smiles, and the ­beautiful and affecting No Woman, No Cry – Ofili's homage to murdered ­London teenager Stephen Lawrence.

From the beginning, Ofili looked cool and hip and outrageously novel. More than a decade on, some of his ­earlier work looks temporarily dated – or at least stalled by the Cool Britannia 90s euphoria for new British art. This will fall away with time. Late in the show, the tempo slows and the light goes out, both in the gallery and in the paintings. The walls are a sombre grey, the paintings hard to read. Their surfaces are thinly washed and layered in nuanced, dark blues. No matter how much you adjust to the gloom, they ­resist the eye. The thinner the paint, the more mysterious and impalpable the images are. Things hover in blue twilight: a dead deer strung up in a forest; soldiers riding through trees; two men making music on a wooden platform, a stage that turns out to be a scaffold. While they play, a hanged man dangles naked beside them. I hear imaginary night airs, a lament to the body hanging there. Why is he there?

Ofili has told one interviewer that this presence was provoked by the empty space he had left on the right-hand side of the painting. But it is hard not to think of some colonial outrage, its aftermath on a hot night. What one cannot see – things in the muzzy blue-green dark, a back-story the paintings might and might not tell – becomes all the more tantalising. I fill the paintings up with my own imaginings, and sit on the floor looking into the near-dark for a long time, among paintings that refuse as much as they bewitch. In Ofili's early work, we lost ourselves in stoned, close-focus detail. Now, we're lost among things unseen.

In dangerous territory

The last room bursts into light again. These paintings are hard to read, too. There is ­Lazarus being raised, his body floppy, his cock rising with him in an erection. In ­another painting, a naked woman (red hair, red labia), takes a drink from a waiter. She seems to have a halo. Elsewhere, there are figures emerging and disappearing into darkness or just trailing off – unpainted, half-seen and unaccountable. Maybe the artist can't account for them either.

In a painting called The Healer, a squatting figure gorges or vomits yellow fruit. The ­symbolism ­escapes me. These paintings are ­uncompromisingly difficult. This is dangerous territory, and some of Ofili's recent paintings ­received a mixed ­reception when they were first shown in New York last year. They feel ­transitional, in themselves and in terms of where they're headed: sometimes what first ­appears as ­mystery or open-­endedness turns out to be a lack of resolution. But when they work – and The Healer does, ­whatever it might mean – they really work. Ofili's ­confidence carries it.

Until the 90s, there were hardly any black students at British art colleges. Ofili's success showed that, if you have the intelligence, savvy and ­ambition, being an artist is a career option. Someone has to pave the way. And it was clear from the first not just how ambitious Ofili was, but how individual his take on painting was – once he'd ditched his student style of narrative figuration (funny how things make their return, and are never ­entirely lost). Rather than living up to his reputation, he is now more concerned to push his art forward. One of Ofili's earlier solo shows was called Freedom One Day: let's see where freedom leads him.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-heads-into-the-shadows/11/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofilis-new-paintings-at-tate-britain-thumbs-up-or-down/9/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofilis-new-paintings-at-tate-britain-thumbs-up-or-down/9/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:14:37 +0000 Charlotte Higgins http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2010/jan/25/art-tatebritain

No elephant dung, no glitter, no textured, collaged surfaces. It's all a bit of a shock. But do we like Ofili's new work?

I'd seen some of Chris Ofili's new work in the lavish new Rizzoli book he has helped put together. Even so, after walking past so many greatest hits and old friends in the galleries at London's Tate Britain, where his latest career survey opens to the public tomorrow, I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.

I have to confess I'm a bit of an Ofili fan. I've always loved the unashamedly stuff-encrusted surfaces of his paintings. So it's a bit odd to see works stripped of their jewels, so to speak.

I'm still figuring out whether I like the new work, which is steeped in the landscape and mysterious atmosphere of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived and worked since 2005. The moment I walked into the final room of the show my heart, I have to confess, sank. Then I looked at the paintings a bit more, and concluded that I kind of liked them. Then I was sure again. There's something slightly off-key about them. In fact, I just don't know. A couple of the recent works were shown in New York in 2007, and the Village Voice critic wrote:

To my mind, what makes Ofili consistently perverse – aside from his habit of turning ostensibly religious subjects into lewd jokes – is that his paintings often flirt with being outright terrible. In the wrong hands, the hyperstylized retro look he employs in these new works could, with just a few bad choices, easily turn into overweening poster art, glib parodies fit only for suburban malls.

I admit to a similar fear. On which side of the good/bad divide do the new Ofilis sit? I'm still digesting them. Adrian Searle has given his view in today's G2. What I love is that Ofili is keeping us on our toes – and is unafraid to change, and, quite possibly, fail.

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No elephant dung, no glitter, no textured, collaged surfaces. It's all a bit of a shock. But do we like Ofili's new work?

I'd seen some of Chris Ofili's new work in the lavish new Rizzoli book he has helped put together. Even so, after walking past so many greatest hits and old friends in the galleries at London's Tate Britain, where his latest career survey opens to the public tomorrow, I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.

I have to confess I'm a bit of an Ofili fan. I've always loved the unashamedly stuff-encrusted surfaces of his paintings. So it's a bit odd to see works stripped of their jewels, so to speak.

I'm still figuring out whether I like the new work, which is steeped in the landscape and mysterious atmosphere of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived and worked since 2005. The moment I walked into the final room of the show my heart, I have to confess, sank. Then I looked at the paintings a bit more, and concluded that I kind of liked them. Then I was sure again. There's something slightly off-key about them. In fact, I just don't know. A couple of the recent works were shown in New York in 2007, and the Village Voice critic wrote:

To my mind, what makes Ofili consistently perverse – aside from his habit of turning ostensibly religious subjects into lewd jokes – is that his paintings often flirt with being outright terrible. In the wrong hands, the hyperstylized retro look he employs in these new works could, with just a few bad choices, easily turn into overweening poster art, glib parodies fit only for suburban malls.

I admit to a similar fear. On which side of the good/bad divide do the new Ofilis sit? I'm still digesting them. Adrian Searle has given his view in today's G2. What I love is that Ofili is keeping us on our toes – and is unafraid to change, and, quite possibly, fail.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofilis-new-paintings-at-tate-britain-thumbs-up-or-down/9/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-a-journey-from-elephant-art-to-mother-natures-son/13/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-a-journey-from-elephant-art-to-mother-natures-son/13/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:26:34 +0000 Charlotte Higgins http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/25/chris-ofili-art

Turner prize-winning artist evolves from dealer in shock to purveyor of colourful perception, as new exhibition shows
In pictures: Chris Ofili retrospective

Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.

But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.

His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.

With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist's studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old's work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.

All the big hits are here, including the Doreen Lawrence painting, No Woman No Cry, which was exhibited in Ofili's Turner prize exhibition in 1998. There is also a fresh chance to see the famous installation The Upper Room – 13 paintings of chalice-bearing monkeys, a reimagining of the Last Supper.

But it is in the final two rooms of the exhibition that audiences will see a different artist from the one whose last solo show in Britain was in 2002 (when the Victoria Miro gallery showed The Upper Room).

These works reflect new surroundings. Ofili has left the crowded London art scene and, since 2005, has been working in Trinidad and Tobago, living in a cottage in the hills above Port of Spain.

"I felt in some way things had closed down," the Manchester-born artist says in the Tate exhibition catalogue. "London was an exciting place to work at one point, because socially it was very progressive – a catalyst... But it got to a point where the social aspect became claustrophobic ... It also got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane. And I didn't feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom."

The penultimate room sees Ofili, like Picasso, going through a "blue period". Giant canvases swirl with a dictionary-defying battery of midnight shades: ultramarine, indigo, smoke, bilberry. The colours are so deep and dark that images are hard to read. The only texture comes from the flat paint surface: sometimes velvety, sometimes reflective.

In one, Iscariot Blues, two men play musical instruments under a bridge while a hanged man dangles from a gibbet – all are enveloped in tendrils of lush foliage.

In these and the most recent paintings, the one recognisable aspect of the work is the mysterious figures that inhabit the paintings. Ofili has always created his own semi-mythological dramatis personae, whether the cartoonish, faux-superheroic character he called Captain Shit in the early work, or the simian saints of the Upper Room.

In a painting that has something of William Blake about it, a shower of egg-yolky, lemony blossoms is surrounded by an almost-black ground. On further inspection, the blackness resolves itself into a curious and possibly terrifying creature that appears to be devouring the flowers.

Ofili calls this figure The Healer, and imagines it gorging itself on the blossoms of the yellow poui tree, which flower in Trinidad with intense vividness and fall overnight. "I imagined that The Healer feasts on the poui flowers feverishly, and in the frenzy many of the flowers fall off," he has said.

The Ofili who was once painting phalluses and porn stars in a King's Cross studio is now painting en plein air – he began The Healer, he has said, outdoors during a lunar eclipse, inspired by "the forms in the clouds hovering over the hills that night".

Where once he was bringing all the clamorous life of London into his exquisite paintings as a self-conscious visual analogy of gangsta rap (aggressive lyrics, sweetly sung), he is now more likely to spend his days kayaking or observing the beauty of a Trinidadian waterfall.

In other words, Ofili is still transforming what surrounds him into paint, but these days that's the thick, fertile vegetation of the Caribbean rather than the urban jungle.

He has said of his new environment: "It has a mystical quality to it. The landscape is hilly, the vegetation is dense and you have the constant feeling that things are happening on the other side of the hill or deep in the forest."

By moving to Trinidad he has also retreated from the public gaze. In 1999, the year after he was the first black artist to win the Turner prize, his work attracted controversy when the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, objected to the exhibiting of The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was touring as part of the Sensation! exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi.

In 2005, the Tate bought the installation The Upper Room for £600,000, when Ofili was a trustee of the gallery. The Charity Commission published a report critical of the institution's mismanagement of the conflict of interest involved in the purchase.

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Turner prize-winning artist evolves from dealer in shock to purveyor of colourful perception, as new exhibition shows
In pictures: Chris Ofili retrospective

Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.

But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.

His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.

With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist's studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old's work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.

All the big hits are here, including the Doreen Lawrence painting, No Woman No Cry, which was exhibited in Ofili's Turner prize exhibition in 1998. There is also a fresh chance to see the famous installation The Upper Room – 13 paintings of chalice-bearing monkeys, a reimagining of the Last Supper.

But it is in the final two rooms of the exhibition that audiences will see a different artist from the one whose last solo show in Britain was in 2002 (when the Victoria Miro gallery showed The Upper Room).

These works reflect new surroundings. Ofili has left the crowded London art scene and, since 2005, has been working in Trinidad and Tobago, living in a cottage in the hills above Port of Spain.

"I felt in some way things had closed down," the Manchester-born artist says in the Tate exhibition catalogue. "London was an exciting place to work at one point, because socially it was very progressive – a catalyst... But it got to a point where the social aspect became claustrophobic ... It also got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane. And I didn't feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom."

The penultimate room sees Ofili, like Picasso, going through a "blue period". Giant canvases swirl with a dictionary-defying battery of midnight shades: ultramarine, indigo, smoke, bilberry. The colours are so deep and dark that images are hard to read. The only texture comes from the flat paint surface: sometimes velvety, sometimes reflective.

In one, Iscariot Blues, two men play musical instruments under a bridge while a hanged man dangles from a gibbet – all are enveloped in tendrils of lush foliage.

In these and the most recent paintings, the one recognisable aspect of the work is the mysterious figures that inhabit the paintings. Ofili has always created his own semi-mythological dramatis personae, whether the cartoonish, faux-superheroic character he called Captain Shit in the early work, or the simian saints of the Upper Room.

In a painting that has something of William Blake about it, a shower of egg-yolky, lemony blossoms is surrounded by an almost-black ground. On further inspection, the blackness resolves itself into a curious and possibly terrifying creature that appears to be devouring the flowers.

Ofili calls this figure The Healer, and imagines it gorging itself on the blossoms of the yellow poui tree, which flower in Trinidad with intense vividness and fall overnight. "I imagined that The Healer feasts on the poui flowers feverishly, and in the frenzy many of the flowers fall off," he has said.

The Ofili who was once painting phalluses and porn stars in a King's Cross studio is now painting en plein air – he began The Healer, he has said, outdoors during a lunar eclipse, inspired by "the forms in the clouds hovering over the hills that night".

Where once he was bringing all the clamorous life of London into his exquisite paintings as a self-conscious visual analogy of gangsta rap (aggressive lyrics, sweetly sung), he is now more likely to spend his days kayaking or observing the beauty of a Trinidadian waterfall.

In other words, Ofili is still transforming what surrounds him into paint, but these days that's the thick, fertile vegetation of the Caribbean rather than the urban jungle.

He has said of his new environment: "It has a mystical quality to it. The landscape is hilly, the vegetation is dense and you have the constant feeling that things are happening on the other side of the hill or deep in the forest."

By moving to Trinidad he has also retreated from the public gaze. In 1999, the year after he was the first black artist to win the Turner prize, his work attracted controversy when the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, objected to the exhibiting of The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was touring as part of the Sensation! exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi.

In 2005, the Tate bought the installation The Upper Room for £600,000, when Ofili was a trustee of the gallery. The Charity Commission published a report critical of the institution's mismanagement of the conflict of interest involved in the purchase.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-a-journey-from-elephant-art-to-mother-natures-son/13/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-at-tate-britain/14/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/chris-ofili-at-tate-britain/14/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:39:45 +0000 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/jan/25/chris-ofili-tate-britain-art The most comprehensive exhibition of Chris Ofili's work to date, featuring over 40 paintings as well as pencil drawings and watercolours, is to go on display at the Tate Britain from 27 January 2010

]]> The most comprehensive exhibition of Chris Ofili's work to date, featuring over 40 paintings as well as pencil drawings and watercolours, is to go on display at the Tate Britain from 27 January 2010

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