Chris Ofili

Artist prize-winner

Chris Ofili

They, the art critics, historians and hangers-on - all white - were outraged at his work. "A depiction of a world of black sexuality inspired by Renaissance painters, William Blake, and Hip-Hop music laced with elephant dung," said some. "Pornographic, profane and "on the edge of the permissible, " said historian Marina Warner. "A triumph for gimmickry and shock tactics," said others.

Nevertheless, Chris Ofili's dense and decorative work incorporating elephant dung with swirls of dots, Afro hair styles and black icons won the £20,000 Turner Prize for 1998- making him the first black, and the first artist to win the prize for contemporary British art since 1985.

Inspiration

No Woman No Cry

"No Woman No Cry, one of his prize-winning entries was inspired by the Bob Marley song. In this tribute to Stephen Lawrence, the schoolboy murdered in a racist attack, Ofili depicts a weeping black woman with photographs of Stephen in her tears.

"My work and the way I work comes out of experimentation," said Ofili in an interview. Elements include the street culture of hip-hop and the lyrics of "gangsta rap". Analogies are drawn between his painting technique, in which materials are formed "layer by layer," to the way hip-hop innovators compose a musical track from different layers of instruments and sounds, laid down one at a time.

His Turner prize capped an astounding year of successes. A popular show in Southampton later toured to London's Serpentine Gallery, and was also exhibited at the Manchester City Art Gallery.

"Ofili has proved popular with a black audience which, it is often assumed, feels alienated by contemporary art...(he) is highly respected among artists, and truly deserves the prize," said the arts correspondent for The Independent in an ecstatic review of the Turner awards ceremony.

Chris Ofili was born in Manchester in 1968. He studied fine art at the Chelsea School of Art and completed a master's degree in painting at the Royal College of Art in 1993. His first solo exhibition was in London in 1991; he has shown in group exhibitions in Manchester, London, Basel, Zimbabwe, Rochdale, Berlin, Tokyo, Glasgow, New York and Hamburg, and in "Brilliant!" New Art from London at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995.