CHRIS OFILI: PARADISE LOST

In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed Paradise Lost exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017.

Since moving to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili has continued to engage with the surrounding environment and culture, which has found its way into many of his colorful paintings. In these deceivingly simple black-and-white photographs, he captures a wide cross section of Trinidad as he highlights the encounter between natural and man-made settings, and the different aesthetic possibilities each brings out in the other. In focusing on a ubiquitous and seemingly unremarkable piece of equipment, Ofili is able to comment on our interactions with space and each other, using a near-universal subject as the fence slices the sky, melds into a tree, frames a basketball game, or reveals an opening.

In a new essay by the critically acclaimed author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro charts the history of chain-link fences; focusing on a selection of Ofili’s photographs, he then begins to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.

Chris Ofili (b. 1968) explores the intersection of desire, identity, and representation in his work, which merges abstraction and figuration; vibrant, symbolic, and often mysterious, his paintings and works on paper incorporate a range of aesthetic and cultural sources. He has presented solo exhibitions at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017–2019); National Gallery, London (2017); New Museum, New York (2014–2015); The Arts Club of Chicago (2010); Tate Britain, London (2010 and 2005); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2006); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); and Serpentine Gallery, London (1998). Ofili represented Britain in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and won the Turner Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Trinidad. 

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Island People (2016), Names of New York (2021), Nonstop Metropolis (2016), and, most recently, Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made (2026). His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. Jelly-Schapiro teaches journalism at New York University and is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.