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. 29, illustrated (edition number unknown).

Lot Note:

Half Moon (Silver) 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, with patinated bronze and nickel surfaces standing in for the layered color and glitter of his paintings. 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). Rendered in reflective nickel silver, Half Moon (Silver) translates that dialogue into a compact, close-toned object whose polished surface and intimate scale draw the viewer in even as its subject courts discomfort—a small-scale counterpart to the larger Silver Moon from the same series, and a clear extension of Ofili's consistent interest in the body, relationship, and ritual as sites where the sacred and the profane meet.

Overall: 15 1/2 x 7 x 9 3/4 in.
Overall (with base): 59 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.

Dust has impacted into crevices of work. Small abrasion to upper left in hair. Area of green oxidation to lower right back. Additional images available upon request.

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