The British painter Chris Ofili has turned his attention to one of art history's most famous yet least examined figures. At the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, a new exhibition places Laure, the Black model who appears in Édouard Manet's Olympia of 1863, at the centre of the story rather than at its edge. The show, which opened on 30 October and runs until 4 April 2027, is the latest instalment of the museum's Beyond the Collection programme.

Ofili's response takes the form of new work made for the occasion, including a large painting, a watercolour and a series of drawings. His centrepiece, Saint Laure (2026), is painted at exactly the same scale as Olympia itself, a deliberate echo that gives Laure the monumentality Manet reserved for his reclining courtesan. In Ofili's version, Laure carries the flowers, recast as the subject of the picture rather than an attendant within it.

The exhibition also brings Manet's own Portrait of Laure, painted around 1862, out of the Pinacoteca's collection. The work, long known under the title La Négresse, has been renamed for the show. It hangs alongside Ofili's paintings as a reminder of how little is actually known about the woman herself, despite her presence in one of the most reproduced images in Western art.

The Turin season pairs the Ofili show with a retrospective of Alberto Savinio, the Greek-Italian painter and polymath whose brother was Giorgio de Chirico. Looking further ahead, Ofili is due to receive his largest London solo exhibition since his 2010 Tate Britain show, opening at the Hayward Gallery in September 2027.