Alberto Savinio, Chris Ofili and Iris Touliatou

Alberto Savinio: Souvenir
Pinacoteca Agnelli presents a major retrospective of Alberto Savinio (Athens, 1891–Rome, 1952), a revolutionary painter with a unique position in 20th-century European culture. A musician by training, as well as a prolific writer and set designer, he was a theorist of Metaphysical art, later expanded on by his brother Giorgio de Chirico. Savinio turned to painting in 1926, making this year the centennial of his first experiments in the medium. 

Curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo, Souvenir will highlight Savinio’s key themes: mythology and childhood, the ironic and grotesque, the origins of the world to its constant metamorphosis. Savinio’s paintings consider the recovery of the past as a way to mediate between the unconscious and visible world, imagination and rationality. Savinio identifies memory as the place where personal images, collective myths, and fragments of Western culture can be transformed into symbolic configurations and become tools for envisioning the future. 

Classical author, Renaissance man, postmodern intellectual, and artist of the future: Savinio is all of these things. Souvenir celebrates a forerunner of central themes in contemporary artistic and philosophical discourse: the digital recombination of images, their relationship with algorithms and artificial intelligence, the connection between human and non-human, the dissolution of the material into the virtual and the reexamination of notions of originality and authorship. His greatness resides in his ability to draw on the past to imagine what is yet to come and his reminder that art is, above all, a tool for knowledge.

Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet
Pinacoteca Agnelli presents an exhibition of new works by British artist Chris Ofili (1968, Manchester; lives and works in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) in dialogue with Édouard Manet’s masterpiece Portrait of Laure (La Négresse) in the Permanent Collection of Pinacoteca Agnelli. For a long time, the title of Manet’s painting consisted solely of the racial epithet “la négresse,” today recognized as offensive. Research into documents belonging to the artist led to the partial identification of the woman, who we now know was named Laure and lived near Manet’s studio in Paris. 

Chris Ofili responds to Manet’s painting with new works inspired both by the representation of angelic figures in the history of Italian art as well as by Matteo Garrone’s recent film Io Capitano (2023), bringing the history of colonialism and the African diaspora into conversation with the present. In these works, Ofili subverts the centuries-old tradition that relegated Black subjects to marginal positions and transforms Laure into a guiding figure who assists migrants on their journey. Laure, a symbol of care and protection, becomes the guardian of others, the bearer of her own name, and the herald of a new present.

Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet is the new chapter of the exhibition series Beyond the Collection, aimed at reactivating the museum’s Permanent Collection.

Pista 500 Prize: Iris Touliatou
For the billboard of the Pista 500, Vehicles by Iris Touliatou (1981, Athens) is an installation communication campaign for a bird language course as a score for a future action. Taking its name from the Latin vehere, “to carry,” Vehicles makes reference to the automobile industry and advertising. Outsourced to the agency employed by Pinacoteca Agnelli to produce its media content, Touliatou will insert her work within the institution’s existing communication channels, thereby challenging the separation between the creation of art and its distribution. The work’s starting point was a rule that governs access to the Pista, stating that animals are not allowed; this carries an inherent contradiction, being broken by the birds that land on the Pista 500. Touliatou’s conceptual practice questions the limits of the institution's spatial, financial, or administrative structures. It considers the default conditions of the institution, its architecture, staff, rules, budgets, and communication channels, as medium and method, suspending the separation between the production of content and its distribution.