In October 2014, the New Museum will present the first major solo museum exhibition in the United States of artist Chris Ofili’s work. Occupying the Museum’s three main galleries, “Chris Ofili: Night and Day” will span the artist’s influential career, encompassing his paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

Over the past two decades, Ofili has become identified with vibrant, meticulously executed, elaborate artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration. In his extremely diverse oeuvre, Ofili has taken imagery and inspiration from such disparate, history-spanning sources as the Bible, hip-hop music, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. As the title of the exhibition suggests, Ofili’s practice has undergone constant changes, moving from boldly expressive to deeply introspective across an experimental and prodigious body of work. The exhibition will feature over thirty of Ofili’s major paintings, a vast quantity of drawings, and a selection of sculptures from over the course of his twenty-year career.

“Chris Ofili: Night and Day” will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring contributions from the exhibition’s curator, Massimiliano Gioni, as well as art historian Robert Storr, lawyer and journalist Matthew Ryder, National Gallery of London curator Minna Moore Ede, and fellow artists Glenn Ligon and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Margot Norton, Assistant Curator.

Chris Ofili and Massimiliano Gioni in Conversation 10/30/14, 7PM

This event is sold out. Click here to watch the event on the New Museum’s Livestream.

A special public conversation with Chris Ofili and Massimiliano Gioni during the opening week of “Night and Day” . This is a rare opportunity to attend an intimate discussion with Ofili, who is based between Port of Spain, Trinidad, and London. Hear the artist discuss the influences on his wide-ranging practice and the evolution of his subject matter, style, and materials throughout his two-decade long career.

Chris Ofili was born in Manchester, England, in 1968, and currently lives and works in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He received his BFA from the Chelsea School of Art in 1991 and his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1993. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented internationally, including recent shows at the Arts Club of Chicago (2010); Tate Britain, London (2010 and 2005); kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2006); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005). He represented Britain in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and won the Turner Prize in 1998. His works are held in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the British Museum, London; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

www.newmuseum.org