Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins

Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins

Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins
2 June–29 July 2023
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London
N1 7RW

Victoria Miro is delighted to present The Seven Deadly Sins, a major new series of paintings by Chris Ofili. Completed over the past six years, the works on view offer an expansive meditation on sin and the complex experience of sinfulness. In this series of works Chris Ofili contemplates the seven deadly sins – a subject with Biblical origins that bears fundamentally on the human condition and human behaviour.

Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins
Chris Ofili: The Seven Deadly Sins, Installation view
© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

The artist intended each painting not to cleave to a particular sin, but to encompass a spectrum of excessive and transgressive behaviours. Moving through dreamlike realms at once paradisiacal, other-worldly and cosmic, these works depict scenes where humans and mythological creatures co-exist.

The natural world is fecund and mysterious in this territory of sinfulness, a place where magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion hold sway. It seems born of a liminal, trance-like state, perhaps between wake and sleep, when strange visions swim up into the mind’s eye from a creative, playful place in the unconscious that has little to do with the strictures of rationality.

Chris Ofili, The Fall From Grace, 2019–2023
Chris Ofili, The Fall From Grace, 2019–2023
© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication: Ofili invited seven writers – Hilton Als, Inua Ellams, Marlon James, Anthony Joseph, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Attillah Springer and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – to contribute to this book. Like Ofili’s paintings, their poems and narratives are not confined to illustrating single sins but meditate, personally and expansively, on the seven deadly sins.

©2023 Chris Ofili, Victoria Miro