Sure, artists like to mix it up, but poop and glitter?? Throw in the Virgin Mary and you’ve got Chris Ofili’s secret recipe for decidedly controversial art.

To make his work even more risqué, he might decide to add some images of female genitalia and fan them out all over his deliciously gaudy canvases. Who doesn't love a vagina collage? The art world certainly did. Ofili climbed high up the artsy achievements ladder, fast. A member of the Young British Artists group, he came to fame through Charles Saatchi’s exhibitions, most significantly the traveling show Sensation in 1997. And sensational he is.

Your typical Ofili piece will contain a noteworthy quantity of elephant dung, glitter, resin, layers of paint and magazine cutouts. The subject matter includes stereotypes from black culture, imagery from hip-hop, jazz, the Bible, and even Zimbabwean cave paintings. Could the elephant dung be a clever (albeit sort of gross) symbol of his African descent?

People might presume Ofili is celebrating the idea of blackness through these familiar images that draw the viewer in through strange, sexy, sparkly canvases. But there’s an undercurrent in his work that suggests it’s actually trying to reveal the go-to associations people have with "blackness" and thus critiquing racial stereotypes. In any case, religious nutjobs hate him, so we love him.