The plant-munching heads appear in the three works resplendent in the natural light of Victoria Miro’s upstairs galleries, including The Harvester. And another literary source is also pertinent here: Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, with its evocation of “music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.” Last year, Ofili showed small, beautiful paintings of flower-eating heads, that clearly evoked the lotus-eaters whom Odysseus encounters in a narcotic haze. ![]() You feel these paintings as much as see them.Īnd while lust may be the most obviously dominant sin of the seven across the suite of works, sloth – or more accurately a kind of blissful, rapturous repose, an intoxicated state between waking and sleeping – also pervades them. It’s a world of sensation, with the multicoloured constellations of dots that glister from Ofili’s surfaces producing a perpetual tingling. Seemingly everything is bodily, with intertwining forms, figures half-disguised in dense masses of petals, liquid forms or smoky plumes. ![]() Emerging from the mouth of the shadowy, hooved, tailed and horned figure who reclines at the base of the picture – if not the devil, then devil-ish – is a bloom with distinctly vaginal form, aptly placed amid the body of female figure swinging languidly from vines.Īnd while this is the most overtly sensual of the works, the entire group is fertile, abundant, tumescent. But the flirtation, however unsubtle in the Fragonard, gives way to full-blown eroticism in Ofili’s response. The clearest reference is The Swing, Fragonard’s great painting in the Wallace Collection, in which a reclining male figure looks excitedly up the dress of the swinging woman. Nothing here is likely to prove as controversial as that work was back then, but there is a similar playfulness with the art of the past. SPONSORED Do you have the business idea to win a £25,000 prize? Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Web(s) of Life: the anger is palpable.London Gallery Weekend: the highlights of London’s biggest art weekend. ![]() Tracey Emin at Hay Festival: ‘Keir Starmer has no edge’.It laid bare the often disguised eroticism in art historical depictions of Mary. Think back to The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) – his “hip-hop version” of the biblical figure, surrounded by cherubim collaged with women’s buttocks from porn mags. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĪnd you wouldn’t expect a conventional take on Christian or biblical themes from him, anyway.
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