Provenance:

Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2003.

Lot Note:

Chris Ofili’s works on paper have long run concurrent with his paintings and sculpture—not as preparatory sketches, but as fully realized statements in their own right. The Afromuses, a series of small-format watercolors created between 1995 and 2005, form the core of this practice: daily, meditative studies completed in a single sitting, each confined to the same modest scale and the same basic armature—hair, face, neck, and chest, seen frontally or in profile. Within that self-imposed discipline, Ofili found room for continual invention in color, pattern, and technique, with each figure emerging as a distinct study in adornment, hairstyle, and Black identity, drawn from memory, popular culture, and art history rather than any single sitter.

Elsewhere in his works on paper, Ofili pushes past watercolor’s immediacy into richer, more ceremonial registers—charcoal set against gold leaf and gouache, for instance, lends a devotional, almost iconic weight to subjects like the recurring pairing of a man and woman, a study in intimacy and courtship that runs throughout this body of work.

What unites these works across medium and mood is Ofili’s consistent instinct toward beauty as strategy: "I try to make [my work] more and more beautiful, to decorate it and dress it up so that it is so irresistible, you just want to be in front of it" (C. Ofili, quoted in L. Macritchie, "Ofili’s Glittering Icons—Work of Chris Ofili at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York," Art in America, January 2000). Whether in the bloom of a watercolor wash or the shimmer of burnished gold, that pursuit of surface seduction is what gives even his smallest, most intimate works their compelling nature.

Ofili’s work holds a firm place in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the British Museum, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others—a testament to the critical and curatorial consensus behind an artist whose market remains comparatively concentrated in a small number of headline works.

Framed: 17 1/2 x 14 x 1 in.

Sheet is toned. Crease at left extreme edge near center. Work is hinged to back mat along top, right and left extreme edges verso, making verso largely inaccessible. Additional images available upon request.

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