Chris Ofili restores visibility to Manet’s forgotten muse
A luminous new body of work by Chris Ofili confronts the erasure of Black models in nineteenth century French painting, honouring the identity of a woman rendered anonymous by history.
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The act of looking, truly looking, at a portrait painted in 1862 becomes an act of restoration. Édouard Manet’s Portrait of Laure has hung in museum collections for generations, a study in ochre tones and delicate rendering, yet the woman herself remained consigned to anonymity, her name recorded only in archival whispers. Now, in an exhibition of remarkable cultural reckoning, Chris Ofili has chosen to meet Laure across the centuries, creating a series of large scale paintings and watercolours that insist upon her presence, her interiority, her complete and complex personhood.
Ofili’s intervention is one of profound artistic generosity. His new work, including the monumental Saint Laure, emerges from scholarly research by Denise Murrell into the Black models who graced the canvases of late nineteenth and early twentieth century French painting yet were systematically denied recognition and agency. These women were rendered as objects, their identities absorbed into aesthetic abstraction. Ofili’s response is to make them visible again, not through mimicry or historical recreation, but through a contemporary visual language that acknowledges both the violence of erasure and the possibility of retrieval.
A Conversation Across Time
The exhibition, titled Laure: Chris Ofili and Édouard Manet, unfolds at the Pinacoteca Agnelli as a dialogue rather than a confrontation. Manet’s original portrait hangs in company with Ofili’s paintings and watercolours, inviting the eye to move between them, to recognise rupture and continuity, absence and presence. This is curatorial work of rare sensitivity, orchestrated by Pietro Rigolo, that allows both artist and sitter to occupy the same space with dignity.
Ofili’s palette here is luminous and considered. Watercolours such as Laure’s Flowers in the Desert speak to a spiritual dimension, to gardens both real and imagined, to the interior worlds that portraiture can intimate but never fully capture. The larger paintings possess a monumental stillness, a gravitas that reframes how we might think about the nineteenth century model, no longer an anonymous prop in another’s artistic vision but a figure of consequence and depth.
What makes this body of work so vital is its refusal of easy resolution. Ofili does not pretend to know Laure, nor does he simply insert a contemporary sensibility where historical fact proves elusive. Instead, his paintings ask the viewer to sit with the paradox of looking at someone who was never fully seen, to participate in an act of ethical attention. In doing so, he transforms the gallery into a space where history becomes permeable, where the past and present converge around questions of representation, identity and the humanity that portraiture, at its finest, can honour.
The exhibition remains on view through April 2027.
Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).
