return to worldwidereview.com, the home of critical reviews

Chris Ofili at Tate Britain London england

From:     rebecca sutton
Category: Art
Date:     30 January 2010
Time:     12:51 PM

Review:

Chris Ofili is one of our finest painters and his new show surveys his work from dung to now. How sick 
he must get of people calling him the elephant shit guy but actually 90% of the work in the show has it 
on, or is leant on it, and some of the pictures really don't benefit from it. Fair play to Chris for finally 
moving on from all the dots and varnish and actually letting a picture be. The last two rooms aren't 
great but you can see him loosening up (his watercolours are certainly fluid) and making some 
progress. By far the most effective room is the controversial baboon enclosure smelling like a pine 
forest, each painting glows with a different colour, and you get a mood on.  He sort of pulls all the 
pattern together here with the repeated monkey motif overcoming the neurotic mark making, and that 
caps it all. There are a few really good  giant paintings in red and green. The video of him swimming 
in a waterfall and driving his truck is a little bit hard to take, how many more paintings colonists on 
holiday  do we need, though Trinny looks tropical if a little dull. More than anything Ofili has the typical 
moaning mancunian scepticism, stubborn and combative his paintings could do with a little more of 
that and less of the decoratif.


return to worldwidereview.com, the home of critical reviews