Chris Ofili

Chris Ofili (born 1968) is an English painter noted for works referencing aspects of his African background. He is one of the best-known Young British Artists, a Turner Prize winner, and the source of one of the New York art world's biggest scandals. It was Ofili's painting, a depiction of a black African Virgin Mary surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, that caused then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to close the infamous ...See more

Chris Ofili (born 1968) is an English painter noted for works referencing aspects of his African background. He is one of the best-known Young British Artists, a Turner Prize winner, and the source of one of the New York art world's biggest scandals. It was Ofili's painting, a depiction of a black African Virgin Mary surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, that caused then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to close the infamous "Sensation" exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum in 1999. See less