His works center around the relationship between form and content: often using several layers of paint, resin, glitter, collage elements, and occasionally, elephant dung, Ofili enlists sexual, cultural, historical, and religious references to create uniquely aesthetic and physical works that expose the darker undercurrents of society, while also celebrating contemporary black culture. While his early works were predominantly abstract, involving intricate patterns and colors, he has since developed a signature figurative style that bridges the gap between the sacred and the profane, and by extension, between high art and popular culture. Since the mid-1990s, Chris Ofili has become well known for his vibrant, technically complex, and meticulously executed paintings and works on paper. In journeying deep into Homer’s Odyssey in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.
Listen to an epic live episode of Dialogues. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. Roderigo has been paying Iago to help him win Desdemona s hand in marriage. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object-something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. Othello begins on a street in Venice, in the midst of an argument between Roderigo, a rich man, and Iago. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today.
In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. Othello remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love.
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