Angela Choon Knihy

Few artists' names can connote such diverse associations as the Virgin Mary, Rudolph Giuliani and elephant dung. (Put thus, it seems rather an achievement.) Controversy tends to dog the art of Chris Ofili, and former New York Mayor Giuliani's suspension of funding for the Brooklyn Museum upon its exhibition of his 1996 painting "The Holy Virgin Mary" in 1999 was but one instance of the ire Ofili routinely arouses. When these occasional media commotions subside, one sees that the work is actually pleasing in more familiar Ofili's surfaces sparkle with smears of glitter and bright veneer, resembling nothing so much as African icons. But Ofili has always been political, specifically in his confrontations with racial cliché, and in his insistent incorporation of materials from popular black culture. Devil's Pie derives its title from singer-songwriter D'Angelo's 1998 lyric meditation on temptation and retribution. According to the song, the ingredients of a devil's pie include "materialistic, greed and lust, jealousy, envious / bread and dough, cheddar cheese, flash and stash, cash and cream." Similarly diverse in its references and dichotomies, Ofili's work contains contradictions. This catalogue collects his work in sculpture, painting, printmaking and graphite drawing for the first time and includes texts by art writer and curator Klaus Kertess and writer Cameron Shaw.

On Kawara (1932-2014) is considered to be one of the most important and most radical modern artists of our time. His oeuvre is consumed with time and place, concepts that he used to try and map out the meaning of human existence. On Kawara: 1966 focuses on Kawara's creations from 1966, a key year within his oeuvre as it was the birth of his world-famous date paintings: small paintings in which he inscribed the exact date on which he created the painting in white letters and numbers on a monochromatic background. If a painting wasn't complete by midnight, it was destroyed. The TODAY series, as the entire collection is called, comprises some 2,000 date paintings created in more than 100 different cities. The artist used a folder to accurately record the days on which he created a painting and what the format was. He also kept a smear of the paint he used and the newspaper headlines for that day in this folder. This folder, in which he documented his 1966 creations, is fully portrayed in On Kawara: 1966. In 2015, Kawara's date paintings from 1966 were displayed in the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum in Deurle. This was the last project that the artist collaborated on, together with the museum curator and the editor of this book, Tommy Simoens, before his death in 2014.