Laure. Chris Ofili & Èdouard Manet

Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet continues the Beyond the Collection series, through which Pinacoteca Agnelli invites contemporary artists to engage with works from its Permanent Collection, offering new perspectives on the museum’s holdings. For this latest instalment, Chris Ofili presents a new series of works developed in response to Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Laure (La Négresse), painted around 1862 and held in the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s Permanent Collection.

The project takes as its starting point the painting’s earlier title, which reduced the complexity of Laure’s identity to a racial classification. Ofili restores centrality to Laure, the woman portrayed by Manet, while reflecting on how images shape the ways in which identities are defined.

Through his paintings and drawings, Ofili weaves together historical references, personal experiences, cultural memory and diverse figurative traditions, creating a visual universe characterised by remarkable chromatic richness and narrative depth. His dialogue with Manet thus becomes an opportunity to explore questions of representation, memory and the rewriting of art history.