Chris Ofili

To say Chris Ofili's show is 'the shit' is, of course, street slang or ebonics for 'good' - in other words, it's an affirmation of his abilities to turn such negatives into positives, to transform muck into brass and to create something out of nothing. As an artist, Ofili has come a long way since first applying great pachyderm plops as props to his paintings: he won the Turner Prize in 1998, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and has been feted in major shows from New York to Berlin. A straw-matted 'Painting with Shit on it' begins this retrospective rather falsely in 1993 - perhaps to avoid any earlier student misfires - but nonetheless marks the discerning placement of elephant excrement as the point at which Ofili's work came, kicking, screaming and smelling, into the art world.

A dung-face sculpture, 'Shithead' also from 1993, with human milk teeth and the artist's own shorn dreadlocks stares back at you defiantly, like some African fetish statue or self-portrait voodoo doll. Yet it also opens this display with a smile, lending Ofili an air of humour that he isn't often credited with, despite his prodigious use of big black cocks, tits 'n' ass and titles such as '7 Bitches Tossing Their Pussies Before the Divine Dung' (after the 1803 watercolour, 'Elders Casting Their Crowns Before the Divine Throne', by William Blake, whom Ofili affectionately calls 'Billy').

Ofili's funny side is also the arena for his swaggering, balls-grabbing '90s hip hop persona, whether in his portrait of Captain Black Shit (a hip-grinding, blaxploitation version of Superman) or the misogynistic rap cliché titles, such as 'Pimpin' Ain't Easy'. However, there is a serious side to all this faux-ignorance and surface glorification, especially in the works 'Blind Popcorn' and 'Afrodizzia', where famous black faces - such as Marvin Gaye, Nelson Mandela and Busta Rhymes - either have their eyes painted out, as if in shame, or their hair puffed up into ludicrous afros.

Ofili lampoons these black idols knowingly. He suggests something of the precarious positions these heroes hold in society by pinning them on his pictures as either role models or targets, thus keeping one eye on the potential fall from grace that comes with any such fame. In this regard, Frank Bruno's name glistens from one 1996 dung-mound like an omen of bad juju to come.

This show goes beyond Ofili's identification with popular notions of blackness to reveal his obsession with another kind of supercharged cultural glue, namely religion. It's also an exhibition about his maturation as an artist and the two themes come to a glorious head in the 'Upper Room' (1999-2002), an astonishing installation of 13 paintings in a wooden shrine. Each panel depicts a colour-coded monkey, standing in for one of Christ's disciples at the Last Supper, with a yellow-bellied Judas sitting to one side. At the centre is a radiant gold rhesus-king, part Hindu deity Hanuman, part Buddhist statue. Gone is the sacrilegious mix of big-butt porn and Christian chastity at the high altar of bad taste that was 'The Holy Virgin Mary' of 1996. Ofili's drips, dabs and dots, which previously coalesced into kaleidoscopic belts of tribal pattern and cosmic funk, now attain a higher purpose. 'The Upper Room' is truly a moment of transcendence.

After this, and his 2003 Venice series, which epitomised Ofili's Edenic celebration of Afrocentricity in glorious red, black and green, the artist moved with his family to Trinidad and a shift occurred - although not entirely for the best. That he was aware of the risk of 'going native', of being the British/Nigerian outsider looking in on an alien Caribbean culture, is only too apparent in the subsequent work.

Two of the dark 'Blue Rider' pictures, made just before he left London, are of European interlopers riding into a mysterious jungle colony at night, perhaps signalling the arrival of Ofili and his old friend Peter Doig, who himself relocated to Port of Spain in 2003. However, Doig grew up in Trinidad and seemed more comfortable with his Damascene conversion when he showed his most recent paintings in a similar mid-career retrospective, in the very same galleries as Ofili, only two years ago.

The final room, Ofili's Colonel Kurtz arrival, is not nearly as successful as Doig's was, but then what he's lost in visual oomph and political power, he's gained back in sensual mystery and terrible beauty. There's less aggression and more expression, as though Ofili was done with being the 'turd world' poet and was ditching his own roots to find some new routes out of a painterly cul-de-sac in the UK. His latest tall landscapes aren't triumphs exactly, but they do ooze dark witchcraft and the myths of Anansi. It's not that his shit don't stink, it's just that even when he's bad meaning bad, he's still bad meaning good.