Chris Ofili

British painter Chris Ofili is known for his chromatically bold and texturally dense pictures of lovers, spirits, and monkeys, which are usually supported by spheres of elephant dung. Ofili’s recent works, however, have moved beyond his familiar pop-cultural pastiche and base materiality. “Afro Margin,” a suite of eight pencil drawings made between 2004 and 2007, marks this transition and reveals an unexpected delicacy and rigor in his process.

Ofili began each drawing with the same bounding principle, an organic yet rigid colonnade of the “Afro heads” that appear as aboriginal constellations in his earlier paintings. The towers are bounded by the vertical dimensions of the paper but starkly delimit the surfaces of the works. Each of the drawings is a study of the shapes and textures that can be iterated, in lateral form, from the stacked heads.

If this sounds systematic, it is, but to great effect. Afro Margin One, 2004, feels tentative, its vascular array of lines revealing marine forms and topographic perspective but halting halfway across the page. In contrast, the inky expansion of the heads themselves in Afro Margin Eight, 2007, nearly blots out the page with its repetitions. Which is to say, the series finds Ofili at his most studied, working through the formal possibilities of a loaded cultural signifier.

The pictures, which are overwhelmed by the massive exhibition space, convey a feeling of intimacy and precision, like field notes by a nineteenth-century naturalist. This small scale and diaristic quality is at once ghostly and elegant, and the exhibition shows a different side of the artist who shocked at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.