The New Musuem’s Chris Ofili: Night and Day is extended

Chris Ofili’s oeuvre, in exhibition at the New Gallery in New York City, has been extended for a run until February 1. Last week, Ofili impromptu and unannounced arrived to the New Gallery’s lobby, making pins, miniature regalia for the museum visitors. Upcoming is a discussion on the British artist’s work by writer-scholar Fred Moten. On Thursday, January 29, Moten will lead a talk, filtering Ofili’s work through the lenses of Moten’s foci; as the New Museum describes them: “the intersection of black studies, performance, poetry, and critical studies.”

Ofili’s exhibit boasts the romantically sensuous, the overtly phallic, the playfully pop-cultural, the quotidian, the decadent, the bizarre. One of his mediums, for example, is elephant dung, a material in which he first became interested and began using during an art trip to Zimbabwe. As a sculptural material, he molds and works it like clay. On display is his piece Shithead, a cranial form accented with an infant’s teeth outlining its ‘mouth’ and Ofili’s own, cut dreads atop it. The dung, at this point in his career/oeuvre a somewhat characteristic medium, is also used to adorn large-scale paintings, mounting a base or creating texturized assets on a canvas.

There is a group of Ofili’s watercolors on display, Afromuses; they are a series of small-scale portraiture, which oftentimes have played prequels to his larger-scale subjects. Other techniques, more typically associated with Ofili’s work, include a sort of impregnated pin art, with bubbly paint dots texturizing wall-spanning sceneries, often of attenuated, sometimes of buxom, characters – Afronirvana, below, being exemplary of this style.

Ofili’s paintings call to mind the work of photographer Malick Sidibé, for the way they capture the soul and spirit of their subjects amidst the maelstroms of Afro-Caribbean cultural and stylistic crossroads, to which each subject so inevitably belongs. (‘Tis life; ‘tis the syndrome of the artist who seeks their subject, their inspiration, from cultures pulled and torn, yet celebrated, by a parental westernism.)

The New Museum’s Chris Ofili: Night and Day is Ofili’s first major museum solo exhibition in the United States.