Giorgio de Chirico

Throughout his long career, Giorgio de Chirico forged his own unique idiom. Relying on a series of enigmatic motifs, from empty arcades and classical statuary to a red rubber glove, de Chirico’s paintings captured an atmospheric, eerie tension that seemed cleaved from a dreamworld. Referring to himself as an ‘outsider’, the artist was a creative maverick whose unclassifiable aesthetic proved fundamental to the establishment of the Parisian avant-garde and, particularly, Surrealism.

Born in 1888 to Italian parents living in Greece, de Chirico attended the Athens Polytechnic Institute and took drawing classes at night; later he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. For the next few years he moved frequently, first around Italy, and then to Paris.

Broadly, the works created during the artist’s years in the French capital are considered to be among his most important, notably The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, The Song of Love and The Enigma of a Day. Works dating from these years were included in the 1912 and 1913 Salon d'Automne as well as in the Salon des Indépendants in 1913 and 1914.

Inspired in part by Max Klinger’s and Arnold Böcklin’s oeuvres — artists who paired the fantastical with the everyday — de Chirico too played with incongruous juxtapositions to create mysterious, beguiling worlds that feel wholly separate from reality. His was an idiom rooted in originality: as Guillaume Apollinaire, who de Chirico had met in Paris, wrote, ‘The art of this young painter is an inner and cerebral one that has nothing in common with the art of the painters who have emerged in recent years.’

The outset of World War I forced de Chirico to return to Italy, where he met Filippo de Pisis and Carlo Carrà, with whom he founded the Scuola Metafisica, or Metaphysical School, in which fantasy and Realism combined. While continuing to build upon the themes that he had long explored, during the 1920s de Chirico also looked to antiquity and the Renaissance, filling his canvases with classically inspired nudes and architecture.

In subsequent years, he had solo exhibitions at various international galleries and participated in the 1924 Venice Biennale, Milan’s V Triennial and Rome’s III Quadrennial d’Arte Nazionale, among others. In addition to painting, de Chirico designed the sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's production of Le Bal as well as those for other operas and ballets, and illustrated several texts including Jean Cocteau’s Le Mystère Laïc – Essai d’étude indirecte. Alongside his visual practice, he wrote criticism, reviews, novels, poems and plays.

De Chirico continued to explore several motifs from his metaphysical practice throughout his career, including the gladiator and mannequin, and worked and exhibited internationally for the rest of his life. De Chirico died in 1978 at the age of 90.