Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet

The ‘Beyond the Collection’ series continues with *Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet*, through which the Pinacoteca Agnelli invites contemporary artists to engage with works from its Permanent Collection, generating new perspectives on the museum’s heritage. For this new instalment, Chris Ofili (1968, Manchester; lives and works in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) presents, from Friday 30 October 2026 to Sunday 4 April 2027, a previously unseen series of works inspired by Édouard Manet’s *Portrait of Laure*, a painting created around 1862 and held in the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s Permanent Collection. The project takes its starting point from 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 her figure to centre stage and reflects on the way in which images help to define identities. In his paintings and drawings, Ofili weaves together historical references, personal experiences, cultural memory and diverse figurative traditions, constructing a visual universe characterised by extraordinary chromatic and narrative richness. The dialogue with Manet thus becomes an opportunity to address themes such as representation, memory and the rewriting of art history.