Provenance:

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2005.

Literature:

Berlin, Contemporary Fine Arts, The Blue Rider: Chris Ofili, exhibition catalogue, 2005, p. 27, illustrated (edition number unknown).

Lot Note:

Half Moon (Blue) dates to 2005, the year Ofili made his debut as a sculptor with The Blue Rider, an exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, staged in the wake of his acclaimed presentation in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the unveiling of The Upper Room at Tate. For that body of work, Ofili restricted himself to a tightly controlled palette of blue and silver, deploying patinated surfaces in place of the layered color and glitter of his paintings—a chromatic discipline that gave the exhibition its name and unified painting and sculpture alike. The sculptures took as their starting point the Catalan tradition of the caganer—a squatting, defecating figure tucked into nativity scenes as an irreverent note of earthy humanity amid the sacred—a reference that extends Ofili's long-standing, deliberately provocative use of scatological imagery, most notoriously in his elephant-dung-inflected paintings of the 1990s.

As Ofili has explained of these figures: "It's what they symbolize that interests me. The sculptures are a dialogue — about relationships, about how people can be both intensely connected and entirely at ease with one another" (C. Ofili, quoted in Chris Ofili: Silver Moon, Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow). Cast in blue, Half Moon (Blue) stands as the cooler-toned counterpart within this small body of sculpture—its deep, night-inflected surface anticipating the blue palette that would come to define Ofili's paintings following his move to Trinidad that same year—while carrying forward the same interest in the body, relationship, and ritual as sites where the sacred and the profane meet.

Overall: 16 x 9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. 
Overall (with base): 59 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.

Dust has impacted into the crevices of the work. Additional images available upon request.

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