Chris Ofili Restores Laure to Centre Stage in Turin

The Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin opens its latest curatorial cycle on 30 October. Chris Ofili steps into the frame with Beyond the Collection, a project that extracts a peripheral figure from nineteenth-century painting and places her at the forefront. Édouard Manet's Olympia has dominated museum walls for over a century. The Black woman handing flowers to the reclining courtesan remains largely unnamed in popular discourse. Ofili corrects that omission. He presents a new painting, a watercolour, and several drawings dedicated to Laure.

Pietro Rigolo, chief curator and head of collections at the gallery, notes that the artist begins by restoring identity to a woman reduced to a compositional device. The institution has already adjusted its own records. Manet's circa 1862 canvas, formerly catalogued as La Négresse, now carries the title Portrait of Laure. Staff members raised no objections during the reclassification. Rigolo emphasises that Ofili treats archival silence as a starting point rather than a barrier. You might notice how quietly the museum operates when it decides to rewrite its own labels.

The centrepiece, Saint Laure (2026), matches the dimensions of Manet's original composition. Ofili replaces the Parisian brothel setting with an arid terrain that stretches across the lower register. This structural shift moves the subject away from the background and into direct confrontation. The artist draws upon early Renaissance traditions alongside contemporary cinema, weaving references to Giotto and Fra Angelico into the handling of drapery and light while incorporating narrative threads from Luca Guadagnino's 2023 film Io Capitano. The movie tracks two Senegalese cousins crossing the Mediterranean. Ofili anchors his visual language to the unnamed migrant known simply as the woman in the desert. The political climate in Italy feels heavy in the room. Migration dominates public debate right now. Ofili channels that tension into pigment and canvas.

Academic rigour underpins the visual experiment. Denise Murrell, curator-at-large at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, supplied research materials for the project. Her earlier scholarship dismantled entrenched assumptions about Black female sitters in modern European painting. Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery hosted her landmark survey in 2018. Ofili requested her involvement from the earliest planning stages. Murrell contributes a critical essay to the accompanying publication. Sarah Cosulich, director of the Pinacoteca Agnelli, frames the initiative as a necessary reckoning with institutional historiography. She observes that conventional art history often manufactures exclusions. Ofili approaches those gaps with deliberate imagination. The result feels striking rather than decorative.

The autumn season at the Turin venue extends beyond Ofili's intervention. A major retrospective examines the work of Alberto Savinio, brother of Giorgio de Chirico. The polymath helped establish Metaphysical painting during the twentieth century. His canvases and writings remain on display until 4 April 2027. Both programmes share identical scheduling parameters.

Attention soon shifts northward. The Hayward Gallery in London prepares to host Ofili's most extensive solo presentation since his 2010 survey at Tate Britain. The exhibition runs from 7 September to 9 January 2028. Curators will arrange key pieces from the 1990s alongside recent oil studies. The chronological span covers thirty years of production. Visitors will encounter the evolution of his palette and his ongoing negotiation with colonial iconography. The final wall label reads 9 January 2028.