CHRIS OFILI
David Zwirner

Chris Ofili’s latest exhibition is big in several respects: It is sprawling, it encompasses different media, it includes large works, and, typically of this protean artist, it is big-hearted and boisterous.

Mr. Ofili rose to prominence in the early 1990s with intensely decorative, bizarrely crafted, unorthodox canvases that drew upon the British artist’s African heritage. He often used elephant dung, sticking it, for instance, to a surface, or using it as a prop upon which to lean his canvases. “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996), a primitive rendering of the Madonna that incorporated dung and also embellished its surface with erotic body parts culled from pornography, notoriously aroused the ire of Mayor Giuliani when it was exhibited with other “Young British Artists” at the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” show in 1997.

Mr. Ofili’s latest work eschews some of the exoticism of his earlier style. He is done with dung. In place of the kind of painstaking, meticulous workmanship associated with tribal crafts and alluring, dazzling materials such as glitter and map pins (which often came into their own in installations with dramatically focused light in dark rooms), the new work is relatively conventional. Some of the paintings entail collage, but the pictures are worked mostly in straight oil on linen. Also gone is the nutty, painstaking application of his early surfaces in favor of loose brushstroke and switch delivery.

A cynic might think that working on a grand scale and volume to meet his market success has determined this shift in style, but I do not sense any sellout in Mr. Ofili’s change of gear. On the contrary, there is a sense of maturity and authority in these graceful, lush canvases. His work always straddled a divide between different cultures; now Western modernism is the primary source, although black culture still permeates the imagery and the religious sensibility of these works. The biggest influences on these paintings are Picasso and Matisse, seen for instance in “The Raising of Lazarus” (2006), but tellingly, the results often recall the African-American expressionist Bob Thompson in the luxuriant elongations of the figures and the lyrical strength of color.

In addition to 15 canvases, Mr. Ofili presents works in other media that draw more overtly on black culture. Drawings and a suite of etchings recall an earlier favorite among Mr. Ofili’s motifs, using tiny skulls as a kind of beading. And among bombastic sculptures in highly polished bronze, “Saint Sebastian” (2007) lacerates the saint’s body not with the arrows of his martyrdom but with nails that recall African carving.

Until November 3 (525 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-727-2070).