Chris Ofili: The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)
When thinking about images of the Virgin Mary - particularly images of the so-called Black Madonna - one must invariably consider Chris Ofili's controversial work of 1996.
The large canvas (244 x 183 cm) depicts an African woman staring directly at the observer and wearing a blue robe on a pretty, shimmering yellow-orange background. The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and animal excrement. The central figure is surrounded by images taken from pornographic magazines of female arses and genitalia. A varnished ball of dried elephant dung forms the figure's bared breast; the painting also stands on two lumps of elephant shit, decorated with coloured pins that spell out the words Virgin and Mary.
Ofili's painting was included in Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition; first in London (1997), then Berlin (1998), before finally moving to New York (1999), where Mayor Giuliani described it as sick and disgusting and where, despite being displayed behind a protective screen, one protester managed to smear the work with white paint; a tellingly symbolic gesture, I think, but one which thankfully caused no lasting damage.
It's easy to see why some - perhaps most - people might initially find this work offensive and even blasphemous, combining in what the artist describes as a hip hop manner religious and artistic ideas of what constitutes the sacred with secular political concerns (to do with race, for example) and the basest of base materials. Is he having a laugh? Yes, he probably is; one is very aware of the wilful absurdity in his work.
But Ofili is also offering us a profoundly serious and sophisticated picture, in which the white-faced Queen of Heaven is transformed back into a black-skinned woman of the world; she whose immaculate heart beats beneath a warm breast of flesh and blood.
The Holy Virgin Mary may not be his best work, but it is for me his most philosophically important; a reminder that everyday life is neither lacking in value nor authenticity and that even in a handful of elephant dung the divine is manifest.
