“I think some of the most serious and weighty subjects should be presented sometimes in a light, glittery, glistening way to lure you in and then, slowly as you become accustomed to that, other layers start to reveal, to unfold. The paintings are layered. My surfaces are always about seduction.”
Trump by Chris Ofili is an exceptional tour de force of contemporary art-making. Executed in 1997-98 – a seminal period in which Ofili became the first black artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize – the present work belongs to Ofili’s early corpus dedicated to championing formidable black women. Presenting collaged and abstracted faces as parodies of sexuality and ethnicity, Ofili bases his protagonists on Blaxploitation heroines, porn queens, and Black Madonnas. Utilising the trump card strategy to overturn the derogatory use of the term spade when referring to black people, the genesis of this body of work was sparked by the rhetoric surrounding women in contemporary hip-hop and gangsta rap culture. Drawing inspiration from David Hammons's Spade series from the mid- 1970s – which exploited the manifold meanings ascribed to the term as a means of chipping away at its negative inscription of black identity – Ofili sought to reclaim the black female image, harnessing the cutting and pasting methodology favoured by hip-hop musicians. A testament to its calibre within Ofili’s eminent corpus, Trump was included in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (2015-16), held at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich before travelling to Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna.
In 1998, the year of its execution, Trump was exhibited at the Southampton City Art Gallery, an exhibition that later travelled to the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. Eliciting a Turner Prize nomination, the exhibition included the seminal No Woman No Cry (1998), a painting espousing grief, grace and beauty as the mother of a London teenager Stephen Lawrence, who died at the hands of a racially-motivated attack in 1993, weeps for the loss of her child. That painting is currently housed in the Tate Collection in London. Other works from this period are considered amongst Ofili’s most successful output, including The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), a career-defining masterpiece now held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; that work was first displayed at the Sensation exhibition in 1997 alongside other works by emerging Young British Artists. Sensation travelled from London to the Brooklyn Museum in New York, wherein Ofili’s offering sparked controversy and criticism on the global political stage. Additional works from this seminal epoch that hold comparable stature to the present work include Blossom (1997), Foxy Roxy (1997), She (1997), Rodin…The Thinker (1997-98), and Pimpin ain’t easy (1998) – all of which featured in the artist’s first solo show at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin at the end of 1997. Heralding a transformative and significant period in his oeuvre, Trump signals a pivotal juncture in Ofili’s practice.
"While Ofili's more recent paintings use the same stylistic components as the earlier work, they no longer immerse the viewer in an immeasurably extended visual space. Ego boundaries are more defined in works like Trump, (1998), and Dreams, (1998). Both of these paintings place the viewer in a centralized relation to the black dotted overlay of their central motifs, the ace of spades in Trump, the dreaming woman in Dreams."
Exquisitely executed in layers of resin, acrylic paint, and glitter, punctuated by roundels of elephant dung decorated with map pins, Trump possesses the idiosyncratic aesthetic that brought Ofili international recognition during the mid-to-late1990s. In 1996, Ofili moved to a new studio in Kings Cross, which at the time was desolate and rife with street crime, prostitution and drug dealing. Reflecting his heady and chaotic new surroundings, psychedelic colours fizz and crackle as Ofili’s gleaming and vibrant two-tone background of orange and fuschia oscillates. Effervescent and illuminating, the pseudo-Madonna (perhaps martyr), through her shimmering and glistening lens, draws parallels with iconography found in Old Master painting. Anointed the ace of spades, traditionally the highest and most valued playing card in a deck, the all-seeing and omnipotent female subject references “black as the ace of spades'' – a racial slur which first came about in 1928; during the Harlem Renaissance, when such phrases grew in popularity, the idiom and motif were instilled with derogatory meaning. Decades later, there was an attempt during the Civil Rights movement to reclaim the term: following Malcom X’s death, American poet and painter Ted Joans eulogised the human rights activist in his poem “My Ace of Spades.” Not constrained by the polemics and theorisation of Blackness, Ofili presents his female figures as a symbolically charged emblem, thus occupying space in the shattered histories of our visual and semiotic lexicon, whilst drawing attention to the weaponisation of language to marginalise the Black female body.
“Modernism and modernity for Ofili refer to two paradigms of an exclusivist canon, the sites where the black subject disappears. For a figurative painter of African descent, the allegorical implications of modernist ambivalence towards the black subject, except as a figure of excess and the improper, hinges on several historical and conceptual issues: the articulation of the proper, the naming of the unnameable, the bringing of the invisible to visibility and the seeking of social redress.”
Further underscoring his own ancestry, the elephant dung balls – engineered to raise the canvas off the floor - serve as a talisman of Black experience. Ofili began using dung after his trip to Zimbabwe in 1992. Satirising David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), in which Hammons sold balls of snow on the streets of New York to highlight the racialised politics in America, Ofili returned to London and sold balls of elephant dung in a market in East London. Highlighting the exoticism of the African continent and his families’ lineage, the dung works as a potent, uniquely African, unifying element, providing a material link to a world of cultural implications that hint at the cycles of life, nature, and ultimately race.
Ofili's works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2003. More recently, Ofili has had a steady stream of important institutional surveys – including the New Museum’s lauded 2015 retrospective Chris Ofili: Night and Day, as well as Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic held at The National Gallery in London in 2017 and his museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami the same year – cementing Ofili’s position as “an artist whose paintings are among the best of his generation” (Ann Temkin, Chief Curator, MoMA, quoted in: Eileen Kinsella, “The Dung-Adorned Madonna That Giuliani Once Tried to Ban Has Been Donated to MoMA by Steve Cohen,” Artnet news, 18 April 2018, online).
