Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet

The new instalment in the series Beyond the Collection presents a previously unseen series of works created by Chris Ofili, developed following an in-depth examination of the work Portrait of Laure (The Black Woman) painted by Édouard Manet at 1862 and kept inside the Permanent Collection of Agnelli Art Gallery a Turin.

Through this exhibition project, curated by Peter Rigolo, the British artist rehabilitates and restores the historical significance of the figure of Laure, the model whose true identity has long been obscured and reduced to a simple, impersonal racial classification due to traditional historical categorisations. Chris Ofili offers an in-depth critical examination of the expressive power of visual languages in defining, shaping and influencing the perception of the’identity.

Using a corpus of paintings e drawings, Ofili weaves masterfully historical references, personal experiences, cultural memory e figurative traditions, giving rise to a body of work characterised by extraordinary chromatic richness and narrative complexity. The ideal dialogue with Édouard Manet It provides a key opportunity to analyse the issues surrounding representationof the collective memory and the rewriting the history of art. The exhibition is complemented by a scholarly essay by the art historian Denise Murrell, one of the world’s leading experts on the figure of Laure.