Collection: Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili (born 1968, Manchester) is a British-Trinidadian painter whose work draws on a wide range of sources — African art, blaxploitation cinema, hip-hop culture, religion, and the history of Western painting — combining them in densely layered canvases that are as much about surface and material as they are about image. Ofili studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art, and won the Turner Prize in 1998.

His paintings are built up through multiple layers of paint, glitter, map pins, collaged magazine cuttings and elephant dung — the last of which became both a signature material and a flashpoint for public controversy. The dung functions simultaneously as support, as symbol and as provocation: it grounds the paintings literally and conceptually, connecting them to ideas of fertility, the sacred and the abject.

Ofili has lived and worked in Trinidad since 2005, a move that shifted the palette and atmosphere of his work toward the nocturnal and the mythological. Publications produced in connection with his exhibitions — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — document a practice that has remained consistently generative across four decades.