Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary: Analysis

This paper will be about the visual description about “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) by Chris Ofili is a narrative painting. Chris Ofili works with embodied spirituality and also a serious artist but he's also playful and ironic. His paintings discharge a psychic energy. The Holy Virgin Mary is a colorful canvas incorporating paper collage, colored pushpins, foil, paint, glitter and elephant manure. (Daily Telegraph) Ofili paints in a semiabstract style and his style were always cartoonish and even a little loopy. Ofilli also has an imagination like he is derived from comic books, hallucinations, and also Aboriginal Art is part of the world’s oldest cultural traditions, and also one of the most brilliant and exciting areas of modern art today. (Australian Aboriginal Art)

One of the most famous examples of Ofili’s artwork of The Holy Virgin Mary where there was an African Madonna figure that surrounded by putti that turn out on closer examination, to be pornographic details cut out of magazines. (Religious Humanism) The idealized image of Mary is a white female painted in a very analytical style. So on one hand it would be really shocking, but then on the other hand they would have to surprising shock of all the saccharine Botticelli-style angels. There was a point when Ofili was playing with the ideas of blasphemy and worship, race and religion and that he was also toying with the public outrage and a private expression so he can make his own spiritual statement. Another impressive thing about The Holy Virgin Mary is that it survived the current onslaught of hatred, adrenaline, and misinterpretation. All of Ofili’s work incorporated in the elephant dung, with the chemically treated putrefaction, odour and flies. Ofili’s always wanted his work to have that raw touch to it and that is why he had to use the elephant dung, he also had the lumps attached to the canvas to support the paintings when they were displayed in the gallery. This piece to me is