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<\/p>\nThe UK artist Chris Ofili is rewriting the canon in a new show launching in Italy, giving one of \u00c9douard Manet\u2019s most famous figures\u2014Laure, the Black model depicted in Manet\u2019s Olympia\u00a0(1863)\u2014her own place in art history.<\/p>\n
For the latest edition of Beyond the Collection\u00a0curatorial initiative at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin (30 October-4 April 2027), Ofili presents new works inspired by Laure including a large-scale painting, a watercolour and a series of drawings. <\/p>\n
\u201c[The exhibition] means questioning who has written our history and the exclusions involved,\u201d said Sarah Cosulich, the director of the Pinacoteca Agnelli, at a press briefing. \u201cArt historians rewrite history in their own way but Ofili brings this imaginative approach,\u201d the exhibition curator Pietro Rigolo tells The Art Newspaper (Rigolo is also chief curator and head of collection at Pinacoteca Agnelli).<\/p>\n
Among the works on view is Manet\u2019s Portrait of Laure (La N\u00e9gresse),\u00a0around 1862, which is drawn from the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s collection and has been renamed (the piece was originally entitled La N\u00e9gresse). <\/p>\n
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Left: \u00c9douard Manet’s Portrait of Laure (La N\u00e9gresse) (1862); Right: Chris Ofili<\/p>\n
Images courtesy Pinacoteca Agnelli; Ofili portrait by Carlos Arias<\/p>\n
\u201cOfili starts with this idea of giving back to this woman her name and her identity, giving her a story and presence,\u201d Rigolo says. \u201cNobody has objected to the name change [of the work],\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Ofili\u2019s large-scale painting, Saint Laure\u00a0(2026), is the same size as Manet\u2019s Olympia, in which Laure brings flowers to a nude, reclining Parisian courtesan.\u00a0In his piece, Ofili turns Olympia\u2019s body into a desert landscape which runs along the base of the work, shifting \u201cLaure from the margins to the centre\u201d, an exhibition statement says.<\/p>\n
For the work, \u201cOfili looks to Italian and religious art\u2014in particular depictions of angelic figures and artists such as Giotto and Fra Angelico (Beato Angelico)\u2014and he also looked to an Italian movie called Io Capitano [2023],\u201d Rigolo adds. Io Capitano\u00a0follows two young Senegalese cousins on their journey from West Africa to Italy. \u201cThere is a debate in Italy about migration\u2014this [Ofili] project is grounded in what is happening in Italy now,\u201d Rigolo says, referencing the ongoing political issue polarising European countries. Ofili bases his depiction of Laure in particular on the film\u2019s unnamed character known as \u201cwoman in the desert\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ofili\u2019s new works also draw on the research of Denise Murrell, a curator-at-large at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Murrell has reshaped the role of the Black female figure in Modern art in her studies, as in the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today<\/a>, which opened at Columbia\u2019s Wallach Art Gallery in 2018. \u201cFrom the outset, Ofili said he wanted to involve Murrell [who contributes to a scholarly booklet accompanying the show],\u201d Rigolo says.<\/p>\n The new season of exhibitions at the Pinacoteca Agnelli also include a retrospective dedicated to the 20th-century Greek-Italian painter and polymath Alberto Savinio, the brother of Giorgio de Chirico who played a fundamental role in the development of Metaphysical art (30 October-4 April 2027).<\/p>\n Next year, Ofili\u2019s largest solo exhibition in London since his Tate Britain show in 2010 will open at the Hayward Gallery (7 September-9 January 2028). It will survey three decades of his practice and feature key works from the 1990s alongside his latest paintings.<\/p>\n