A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner
Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major
museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris
Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks
that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid
juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately
constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and
images culled from popular media, Ofili's unique lexicon combines
African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide
variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings,
Blaxploitation films, and William Blake's poems. Animated by exotic
characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili's most
recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse
and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on
the artist's vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into
question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental
questions of representation.