Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins
Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–6pm
Special opening for London Gallery Weekend: Sunday 4 June: 10am–5pm
16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
The Seven Deadly Sins is a major new series of paintings by Chris Ofili. Completed over the past six years, the works offer an expansive meditation on sin and the complex experience of sinfulness.
In this series of works, Chris Ofili contemplates the seven deadly sins – a subject with Biblical origins that bears fundamentally on the human condition and human behaviour.
Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication: Ofili invited seven writers – Hilton Als, Inua Ellams, Marlon James, Anthony Joseph, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Attillah Springer and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – to contribute new writing. Like Ofili’s paintings, their poems and narratives are not confined to illustrating single sins but meditate, personally and expansively, on the seven deadly sins.
Excerpts from the book feature below, along with commentaries about the paintings on view.
The artist, raised as a Roman Catholic, had long wanted to work through the themes and associations – personal and broad-ranging – that gather around sin. Aware that this significant project would require the devotion of a substantial and unbroken period of time, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would be the long intervals of enforced isolation accompanying the onset of the Covid pandemic which would occasion heightened reflection and introspection. Ofili has said of the resulting series of seven works, ‘It felt like the right subject: for the time and for these times.’
The artist intended each painting not to cleave to a particular sin, but to encompass a spectrum of excessive and transgressive behaviours. For Ofili, ‘There are seven days; each day is made of the same elements – the same hours – but each day turns out differently. Each work takes a slightly different approach, and one sin might become more dominant.’
Moving through dreamlike realms at once paradisiacal, other-worldly and cosmic, these works depict scenes where humans and mythological creatures co-exist. The natural world is fecund and mysterious in this territory of sinfulness, a place where magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion hold sway. It seems born of a liminal, trance-like state, perhaps between wake and sleep, when strange visions swim up into the mind’s eye from a creative, playful place in the unconscious that has little to do with the strictures of rationality.
If these paintings symbolise the mind’s innermost workings, then sin is almost a generating principle, catalysing internal dynamics of self-interrogation and self-knowledge. Although they are not simply autobiographical, Ofili found that their subject matter resonated with his formative religious education, and the impact on his psyche of ideas of right and wrong, guilt, innocence and confession. Here, sin and reflection go hand in hand: ‘I think the works are more about the inner feelings one has about the sin – not necessarily only in the moment of committal – than about what happens afterwards, or the idea of judgement.’
In these works the artist’s interrogations move beyond the straightforward dichotomies of good or bad, before and after; moral and temporal simultaneity are inextricably linked. Characters and events are suspended in a state of growth or motion as the artist seeks to expand the threshold of the moment – discrete instants becoming broad planes which can be inhabited and explored. As Ofili notes, ‘Time can be conceptualised as a sweeping hand, rather than a ticking hand – I’m trying to find a sweep of time, rather than the mechanical units of time.’
Also on view is Ofili’s Pink Daydreams of a Faun, a series of ten prints on unique Suminagashi paintings, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem L’Après-midi d’un faune, and printed and published in 29 suites by Two Palms, New York. Alongside the suite on view is a new book published by Victoria Miro, which includes Mallarmé’s poem and an essay by Minna Moore Ede, who traces its legacy across works by Debussy, Manet, Nijinsky and others, and considers its influence as a generative impulse in Ofili’s work.
‘I think the works are more about the inner feelings one has about the sin – not necessarily only in the moment of committal – than about what happens afterwards, or the idea of judgement.’ — Chris Ofili
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