Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Chris Ofili | Le Monde

 

A collaged artwork features a central globe motif with a reddish figure shaped from a tree growing from the African continent, encircled by a rainbow. Above it, a purple, shredded, winged figure floats. The background is dark with colorful specks, and the entire composition is framed by a black-and-white checkerboard border with vertical text.

Chris Ofili (b. 1968)
Le Monde, 2026 
Ink, watercolour, staples and paper collage on paper
Framed: 27 5/8 x 22 3/8 x 3 1/2 in (70.1 x 56.8 x 9 cm)
© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner 

One thread of interpretation of the World tarot card is the world renewed as paradise. A foundational text is Petrarch’s 14th century allegorical poem I Trionfi, which presents a procession of allegorical figures, each one ‘trumped’ by the next, culminating in the ultimate triumph of Eternity over all: 'I at last beheld a world made new and changeless and eternal. I saw the sun, the heavens, and the stars and land and sea unmade, and made again more beauteous and more joyous than before.' 1 Working with tarot imagery of worlds encircled by concentric rings of elements and presided over by transcendent figures, Ofili’s auratic world is guided by a goddess of both earthly and galaxial dimensions. The artist created the mother earth figure centered in Africa, her roots and branches spreading across the globe, as his recent cover design for the 1979 novel The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta, who migrated from Nigeria to the UK as a young woman. Her glimmeringly resplendent celestial counterpart is Shynel Brizan performing 'I Am Africa, Aja Laive, Aja Lorun (I am Africa, the winds of earth and heaven)'' in Trinidad’s 2026 Queen of Carnival competition preliminaries. 2 This character is a Moko Jumbie, the Yoruban word ‘moko’ denoting a god or ancestral guardian, and the Caribbean ‘jumbie’ a spirit. Walking on stilts, Moko Jumbies are ancestral protectors; their elevated perspective allows them to see evil before ordinary men, and they embody transcontinental resilience: the academic Milla Cozart Riggio reports in Carnival: Culture In Action—The Trinidad Experience that when asked where this character is from, he 'responds that he has walked all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from the West Coast of Africa… even as he endured centuries of brutal treatment he remains 'tall tall tall"'.  3

In Ofili’s work, this Queen Moko Jumbie is attended by sentinels: Adrian Young and his band Iya The Golden Lineage, performing 'The Golden Moko: Eyes of the Ancestors' at the 2026 King of Carnival competition preliminaries. Young has written that this performance summons the Moko Jumbie 'as a dual bodied force of protection and power'. 4 Orbited by planetary headpieces, these figures seem to participate in an eternal gyroscopic movement, in circling motion and yet anchored in space.

Ofili took the photographs of Brizan and Iya The Golden Lineage that are collaged in this work. Beneath them are painted representations of the Three Sisters, sea stacks in Columbus Bay at the tip of Trinidad’s southern peninsula. Columbus is said to have named Trinidad after the Holy Trinity when he landed at this spot – an archetypal colonial ‘discovery of a new world’ that Ofili revitalises with open-ended spiritual meaning.

  1. Taken from web page https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_trionfi.html?page=VI-I.en
  2. The Yoruban Oríkì Ọ̀ya (poem in praise of the Spirit of the Wind) runs as follows: “Ajalaiye, Ajal orun, fun mi ire. Iba Yansan. (The winds of Earth and Heaven bring me good fortune. Praise to the mother of nine.)”
  3. Cozart Riggio, Milla ed. Carnival: Culture In Action—The Trinidad Experience. New York: Routledge, 2004.
  4. thegoldenmoko Instagram post, 14 February 2026: 2026: “From the sacred cosmology of West Africa, The Golden Moko: Eyes of the Ancestors summons the Moko Jumbie as a dual bodied force of protection and power. Standing back to back, The Golden Moko and Daddy Jumbie move as one mirrored, synchronized, inseparable. The Golden Moko is the lightning-born energy, the ancestral force made visible; Daddy Jumbie is the vessel, carrying that power across the earth.
    The bodies are wrapped in streams of golden ones and zeros ancestral code etched into cloth signifying sacred knowledge, cosmic order, and the intelligent design through which the ancestors structure reality. Protection here is not only spiritual, but precise, encoded, and eternal.
    A vast Golden Raffia Skirt surrounds the figures, its sweeping motion forming a living shield honoring traditional Moko Jumbie attire while transforming movement into protection. Charged atomic forms orbit the bodies, generating a field of ancestral defense that pulses from the smallest particle to the cosmic whole.
    The Sun an all-seeing ancestral eye remains fixed as the planets rotate around it. From this Sun, lightning energy descends, traveling through body and grounding into the earth and reconnecting the living world to the ancestral village.
    Suspended overhead, a great golden crown presides symbol of the ancestral realm, infinite in power, eternal in watch.
    The Golden Moko: Eyes of the Ancestors is not a dance it is an activation.
    The ancestors are present.
    The code is alive.
    Protection stands.”