Chris Ofili (born 1968 in Manchester, to Nigerian parents) studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, emerging in the mid-1990s as one of the few Black artists closely associated with the Young British Artists. Where much of that generation worked through conceptual shock or installation, Ofili committed to painting itself — layered, ornamented, built up through resin, glitter, collage, and paint until the surface itself carried as much meaning as the image on it.

A 1992 art school trip to Zimbabwe gave him the material that would define his early career: elephant dung, dried and treated, which he began incorporating directly into his canvases — used as a raised support that lifted the paintings off the wall, and later shaped into elements within the compositions themselves. Raised Catholic and once an altar boy, Ofili has said the connection felt earthbound rather than sacrilegious: a way of grounding devotional subject matter in something unmistakably physical, rather than leaving it suspended in the ethereal register religious painting usually claims.

That tension detonated publicly in 1999. The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) — a Black Madonna, one breast formed from dung decorated with map pins, surrounded by collaged cutouts from pornographic magazines — had already shown without incident in London and Berlin as part of the Sensation exhibition. In New York, at the Brooklyn Museum, it triggered a very different response: then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the painting "sick" and threatened to cut the museum's public funding, a legal battle the city ultimately lost. Ofili, whose own Catholic upbringing had shaped the painting's questions about who is permitted to be considered pure and holy, offered a characteristically understated response: comparing his own version to the sexually charged Old Master Virgin Marys he had grown up looking at in London's National Gallery.

In 1998, at just 30, Ofili became the first Black artist to win the Turner Prize. He relocated to Trinidad in 2005, where the island's Carnival traditions — particularly the Jab Jab, or "blue devil," masqueraders — and an unexpected affinity with German Expressionism's Der Blaue Reiter group reshaped his palette toward deeper blues and looser, more atmospheric compositions, without abandoning the symbolic density that had always defined his work.

The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), his most publicly contested painting, set Ofili's auction record at £2.9 million ($4.5 million) at Christie's London in 2015 — later donated by its buyer, collector Steve Cohen, to MoMA's permanent collection in 2018, the same institution that once stood at the centre of a mayoral lawsuit over the work.

The Upper Room (1999–2002), an installation of thirteen paintings depicting rhesus macaque monkeys arranged in a purpose-built chamber, was acquired by Tate in 2005 — a decision that drew its own controversy, since Ofili was serving as a Tate trustee at the time.

No Woman No Cry (1998), painted in memory of Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teenager murdered in a racially motivated attack, embeds tiny photographs of Lawrence's face within each tear of a weeping woman — one of Ofili's most directly political works, made without any of the shock-value register critics sometimes reduced his practice to.

Ofili's prints translate his densely layered painting practice into a more structured, reproducible format — the accumulation of pattern, symbol, and reference that defines his canvases carries through into etching, screenprint, and lithography, even without the physical dung and resin that give his paintings their raised, tactile surfaces. Editions allow motifs that first appeared in single, unrepeatable paintings to circulate more widely, extending the reach of a practice built on cultural hybridity and layered meaning.

For collectors, Ofili's editions offer accessible entry into a body of work that remains deliberately resistant to simplification — political and spiritual weight held inside surfaces built from ornament rather than illustration. Works are held in the permanent collections of Tate, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou.