Meet Nigerian-British Turner Prize-winning painter, Christopher Ofili » YNaija

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May 25, 2017 6:25 AM

Nigerian-British Turner Prize-winning painter, Christopher Ofili, 48, is currently exhibiting – Weaving Magic at the National Gallery in London. It shows from 26 April to 28 August 2017, so make sure you stop by. Last month, he appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to art.

When he was 30, he was the first black winner of the Turner prize, now receiving the CBE, Ofili felt it was special because of his parents’ decision to move to England from Nigeria over 40 years ago. “We set up our life in England and it’s so special to be recognised for what I do in England and Britain, and for my parents that they made a great choice and invested so much in me. It feels as though I have achieved a lot,” he said.

His new exhibition was commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company (a livery company in the City of London), the centrepiece was created by five weavers which took over three years to weave at Dovecot Tapestry Studio in Edinburgh, and then he painstakingly transferred from a watercolour.

According to The Guardian, Ofili asked himself, could weavers turn wool into water?

A woven tapestry is a sort of pixelated image. Ofili’s The Caged Bird’s Song is, itself, a liquid image – all flow and wetness and saturation. The weavers have caught every fade and bleed and pooling of pigment, the graze of the loaded brush over the paper’s grain, the cursory touches, the way the paint coagulates along an edge as it dries, the way blots sink into the surface. The closer you get to the surface of the tapestry, the more the image breaks down into threads. Where Ofili might use a single colour to paint an area, the weavers might have to use five or six to make it sing. Our eyes do the mixing. In its way, the tapestry, over five metres across, is denser and richer than the watercolour itself. Born in Manchester, Ofili completed a foundation course in art at Tameside College in Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester and then studied in London, at the Chelsea School of Art from 1988 to 1991 and at the Royal College of Art from 1991 to 1993. In the fall of 1992, he got a one-year exchange scholarship to Universität der Künste Berlin.

The Caged Bird’s Song (detail), 2014, the watercolour that weavers turned into tapestry. Photograph: © Christopher Ofili Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

His work which often appears in layers of paint, resin, glitter, dung (mainly elephant) and other materials to create a collage saw him represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Referred to as once belonging to the top gang of Young British Artists, Christopher Ofili in his youth has shocked critics when he presented paintings that incorporated elephant dung and cutouts from porn mags in his painting.

Many say he still mixes pop culture and art history till today. A new Guardian review explains “the idea of going too far has often played a part in his work. He uses it as a kind of force.” He opened ‘Night and Day’ at the New Museum, New York City in 2014.

‘Night and Day’