Almost fifty years after the iconic exhibition held in 1970, Palazzo Reale in Milan again hosts the work of Giorgio de Chirico (Volos, 1888 – Rome, 1978) with over a hundred masterpieces illustrating the unique career of this Pictor Optimus.
An exhibition of intriguing juxtapositions revealing the ethereal world of one of the most complex artistic figures of the 20th century. A key to a style of hermetic painting with its roots in the Greece of the artist’s childhood, that matured to Metaphysics in avant-garde Paris. An artist who bewitched the Surrealists, fascinated Andy Warhol and finally bewildered with his irreverent and ironic reinterpretations of the Baroque.
The over one hundred works on display come from major international museums, among them the Tate Modern in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, the Rome Galleria Nazionale (GNAM), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Venice, The Menil Collection of Houston and the MAC USP in São Paulo, together with numerous institutions in Milan, such as the Museo del Novecento, the Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano, the Pinacoteca di Brera and Villa Necchi Campiglio.
Divided into eight rooms, the exhibition is organised into a series of originally conceived themes to form a chain of visual reactions which, as de Chirico wrote in 1918, chase “the demon in everything […] the eye in everything [because] We are explorers ready for other departures “.