Artist Chris Ofili leaves elephant dung behind

Best known for working with elephant dung, British artist Chris Ofili is now taking a more painterly turn since he moved from London to Trinidad five years ago.

A mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain in London covers the first two decades of the 41-year-old, Turner Prize-winning artist’s work, and one third of the 45 or so paintings on display have not been seen in Britain before.

The earliest paintings date from 1993, a year after he travelled to Zimbabwe where he first thought of applying elephant dung to the canvas.

“He was struck at this disconnect between what he was painting and what he was seeing all around him,” said Judith Nesbitt, chief curator of Tate Britain.

So the first room of the seven-room show, which opens on January 27 until May 16, is dominated by titles such as “Shithead,” “Painting with Shit on it” and “Spaceshit.”

Also instrumental to his artistic style were ancient cave paintings he saw on the same trip to Zimbabwe which helped to inspire his trademark dot technique.

Dung and dots dominate the art in the first part of the exhibition, although Ofili also uses glitter, resin and magazine cut-outs to decorate his works.

Included in the show is “The Holy Virgin Mary,” executed in 1996, which portrays a black Madonna figure with an exposed breast made of elephant dung and cut-outs from pornographic magazines decorating the surrounding canvas.

The work gained Ofili the kind of notoriety which contemporary art embraces when the then mayor of New York took umbrage at the painting when it was shown at an exhibition in the city, and took his case to court.