Bologna, at Palazzo Pallavicini the major exhibition on Giorgio de Chirico

De Chirico and the Beyond. From the“Baroque” Season to Neo-Metaphysics (1938-1978), curated by Elena Pontiggia and Francesca Bogliolo, is the title of the exhibition scheduled from October 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023 at Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna. The exhibition brings together a prestigious body of works by Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, 1888 - Rome, 1978), one of the most influential and recognized painters of the Italian twentieth century.

With more than seventy works from the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation in Rome, the exhibition reconstructs two important moments in de Chirico’s painting: the “baroque” season and the neo-metaphysical season. The former develops from 1938 to 1968, when de Chirico (who in 1939 left Paris and returned to Italy, dividing his time between Milan and Florence before moving permanently to Rome) was inspired by Rubens and the great masters of the caliber of Dürer, Raphael and Delacroix. His works, which are not realist, aim to create an ideal and unreal world, a fiction truer than the real: “we love the untrue,” and again “reality cannot exist in painting because in general it does not exist on earth,” de Chirico himself wrote. The “Baroque” works behind their apparent naturalism are still meta-physical (lit. “beyond nature”), representing a metaphysics of nature, that is, a nature that does not exist in nature.

The exhibition includes a series of important self-portraits, such as the famous Nude Self-Portrait from 1945 and the emblematic Self-Portrait in the Park with Seventeenth-Century Costume from 1956. Here the artist wears old clothes and measures himself against the masters of the past, declares his distance from modernity and rejects the dogmas of the 20th century, revealing himself as the first post-modern artist. Other key works from the “Baroque” season are also on display, such as Ariosto’s Still Life, 1940; The Skater, 1940 (a portrait of his wife Isabella as an allegory of winter); the terracotta Bucephalus, 1940 (one of the earliest examples of de Chirico as a sculptor); and the Villa Medici series (exhibited in 1945 at the San Silvestro Gallery).

The exhibition tour continues with the neo-Metaphysical season relating to the decade 1968-78, in which de Chirico returned to painting the emblematic Mannequins, Italian Squares and other enigmas, with new elaborations and inventions. A shift in motifs and meaning from the nihilistic vision of the 1910s is evident. He reinterprets with irony and in more serene forms the themes of the past, which are enriched with brighter colors, accentuated irony and playful tones, although some melancholy is not lacking. The pasty painting of the “baroque” season was replaced by a painting based on drawing and the sharp construction of forms, and the exhibition documents this final season of the artist’s work with such masterpieces as Hector and Andromache, 1970; The Sun on the Easel, 1973; The Mysterious Baths, 1974; The Disquieting Muses, 1974; and Metaphysical Vision of New York, 1975.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, with texts by Francesca Bogliolo, Mauro Pratesi and Elena Pontiggia, plus an important contribution by Renato Barilli, who testifies to the insight dating back to 1973-74 on the value of Neometaphysics.

The exhibition, sponsored by the Emilia-Romagna Region, is produced and organized by Pallavicini Srl di Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni and Rubens Fogacci in collaboration with Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.

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Bologna, at Palazzo Pallavicini the major exhibition on Giorgio de Chirico

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