Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet

Venue: Various locations. Address: Various locations, Via Nizza 230 int. 103, Turin, TO Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet continues the Beyond the Collection series through which the Pinacoteca Agnelli invites contemporary artists to engage with the works of its Permanent Collection, generating new points of view on the museum’s heritage. For this new chapter, Chris Ofili (1968, Manchester; lives and works in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) presents a series of unpublished works developed from Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Laure, a painting made around 1862 and preserved in the Permanent Collection of the Pinacoteca Agnelli. The project begins with the figure of Laure, the woman portrayed by Manet, whose identity has long been obscured in art history by a previous title that reduced her biographical complexity to a simple racial classification. Chris Ofili restores centrality to her figure and reflects on the way images help define identities. In his paintings and drawings, Ofili weaves together historical references, personal experiences, cultural memory and different figurative traditions, building a visu