Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili
Author: Chris Ofili
Publisher: Tate
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2010-06
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The British painter Chris Ofili was born in Manchester in 1968 and is one of the most notable painters of his generation. This book illustrates works from throughout Ofili's career.

Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost

Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost
Author: Chris Ofili
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2018-09-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1941701825

In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed Paradise Lost exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017. Since moving to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili has continued to engage with the surrounding environment and culture, which has found its way into many of his colorful paintings. In these deceivingly simple black-and-white photographs, he captures a wide cross section of Trinidad as he highlights the encounter between natural and man-made settings, and the different aesthetic possibilities each brings out in the other. In focusing on a ubiquitous and seemingly unremarkable piece of equipment, Ofili is able to comment on our interactions with space and each other, using a near-universal subject as the fence slices the sky, melds into a tree, frames a basketball game, or reveals an opening. In a new essay by the critically acclaimed author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro charts the history of chain-link fences; focusing on a selection of Ofili’s photographs, he then begins to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.

The Upper Room

The Upper Room
Author: Chris Ofili
Publisher: Victoria Miro
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2002
Genre: Apes in art
ISBN:

Installation of 13 paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys in a large walnut-panelled room designed by architect David Adjaye. The room is approached through a dimly-lit corrridor, which is designed to give a sense of anticipation. Each painting depicts a monkey based around a different colour theme (grey, red, white etc.). The twelve smaller paintings show a monkey from the side and they are based on a 1957 Andy Warhol drawing. The larger monkey is depicted from the front. Each painting is individually spotlit in the otherwise darkened room. The room is designed to create an impressive and contemplative atmosphere. The paintings each rest on two round lumps of elephant dung, treated and coated in resin. There is also a lump of the dung on each painting. Strictly speaking, each work is mixed media, comprising paint, resin, glitter, mapping pins and elephant dung. The Upper Room as a whole is described by the Tate (which bought the piece in 2005) as an "installation". The Upper Room is a reference to the Biblical Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples, hence the thirteen paintings. Ofili states the work is not intended to be offensive, but rather to contrast the harmonious life of the monkeys with the travails of the human race.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1644230224

Othello remains one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. In 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. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. 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. 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. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare Series, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili
Author: Minna A. Moore Ede
Publisher:
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2017-05
Genre: Tapestry
ISBN: 9780993442063

Two and a half years in the making, 'The Caged Bird's Song' is a monumental tapestry by the celebrated British artist, Chris Ofili. Accompanying 'Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic', the artist's ambitious presentation of the tapestry within a specially conceived environment in the Sunley Room at the National Gallery, this publication tells the story of the work?s evolution and documents the close collaboration between Ofili and master weavers who have interpreted his designs with astonishing nuance. A suite of previously unseen preparatory watercolours and works on paper and a revealing essay by the exhibition's curator, Minna Moore Ede, further illuminate this extraordinary project by one of the most acclaimed artists working today.

Jim Shaw

Jim Shaw
Author: Massimiliano Gioni
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0847847160

A long-overdue survey of an essential West Coast artist whose humorous works delve into America’s underbelly and evolving counterculture. Over the past thirty years, Jim Shaw has become one of America’s most visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawings, while building connections between his own psyche and the larger political, social, and spiritual history of America. Shaw’s imagery is mined from comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, obscure religious pamphlets, and other cultural refuse to produce a portrait of the American subconscious out of his personal obsessions. Shaw, along with fellow Michigan native Mike Kelley, moved to California in the 1970s to attend Cal Arts and was one of a number of notable artists to emerge from the school in the early 1980s. Shaw’s work is distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected forms of vernacular culture. Accompanying a major exhibition, this is the first major monograph devoted to the entirety of the artist’s unique, multifaceted career.

We Go to the Gallery

We Go to the Gallery
Author: Miriam Elia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780992834913

Have you taken children to a gallery recently? Did you struggle to explain the work to them in plain , simple English? With this new Dung Beetle book, both parents and young children can learn about contemporary art, and understand many of its key themes. Join John and Susan on their exciting journey through the art exhibition, where, with Mummy's help, they will discover the real meaning of all the contemporary art works from empty rooms, to vagina paintings or giant inflatable dogs.

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama
Author: Victoria Miro Gallery
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9781999757908

Akira Tatehata

Artists Living with Art

Artists Living with Art
Author: Stacey Goergen
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781419717826

"Artists living with art" is full of fascinating and often surprising revelations about the artworks a select group of the world's most influential contemporary artists choose to collect and display in the intimacy of their own homes. (Just as Andy Warhol famously collected cookie jars, so do these 25 artists, all living in New York, collect art and in some cases, mundane objects they cherish as art.) The works they display reflect remarkably diverse, eclectic and often unexpected tastes. Many of these homes, some of which also function as studios, have never been seen and offer unique insight into each artists' personal life, creative process, and artistic practices, as well as what inspires them and who their friends are (many swap art with one another). Readers will learn about the pieces most treasured by each artist, as well as their favourite period in art (a surprising number have a preference for pre-twentieth-century art). Authors Stacey Goergen and Amanda Benchley gained unprecedented access into each home for the photography and interviews, and highly acclaimed photographer Oberto Gili was commissioned to shoot the these homes especially for the book.

Alain Elkann Interviews

Alain Elkann Interviews
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781614286325

Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.