Christopher Ofili, (born 10 October 1968) is a British Turner Prize-winning painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in Port of Spain. He also lives and works in London and Brooklyn.

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      Chris Ofili works in a vibrant palette and a variety of applied textures to examine both the contemporary and historical black experience. In intricately detailed works, Ofili deploys inventive figuration rendered in paint and collaged materials such as glitter, magazines cut-outs, and resin. Ofili is perhaps best known for the controversy created by his painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) which, when exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the seminal 1998 “Sensation” exhibition, sparked a series of protests. For its subject matter and its use of lacquered, glittered elephant dung as a material, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dismissed the work as “sick,” and the painting was later vandalized—though it was successfully restored. Nevertheless, Ofili’s work has continued to be exhibited worldwide, notably back in New York with a critically acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014, “Chris Ofili: Night and Day.”

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    What caught my interest isn't just his work but the way he present the work. Chris Ofili’s 'The Upper Room' exhibition consists of thirteen paintings displayed in an environment especially designed by the architect David Adjaye. When it was first publicly exhibited in 2002, critics commented on the chapel-like qualities of the space and its lighting. The arrangement of twelve canvases flanking a thirteenth larger one suggests Christ and his Apostles, and the arrangement has an extraordinary sensory effect. The way he limited the light and create a heavier atmosphere is fascinating. This is what I wanted to achieve in term of exhibition atmosphere. I want the audience to feel like they are getting deeper and deeper inside of the body as they progress through each room to the lower level. By only hi-lighting the artwork and reduce all the light around should help me push the concept of 'body' and 'unknown fear through hypochondria' to it maximum potential.

 

      As for Ofili's exhibition. Each painting shows a rhesus macaque monkey, and each is dominated by a different colour, identified in Spanish on the elephant dung supports. In a text that accompanied the work’s first exhibition, a conservation biologist described the rhesus macaque as ‘loud, active, entertaining, fearsomely intelligent – the consummate cheeky monkey’. She also pointed out how rhesus monkeys have been venerated in certain religions, and observed that ‘monkeys may be godless but rhesus macaques display a deeper degree of compassion for each other than do human beings’.

         

       With this work Ofili raises questions about the relationships between civilisation and untamed nature, between the religious and the secular.