Promoted and Organized by: Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
with: Provincia di Firenze, Comune di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze, Associazione
Partners Palazzo Strozzi
With the collaboration of: Soprintendenza PSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze, Archivio dell'Arte
Metafisica
Curators: Paolo Baldacci, Guido Magnaguagno, Gerd Roos
Starting from the fundamental exhibition organised in Zurich, Berlin and Munich
in 1997, Boecklin, De Chirico, Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse and the essays
written by Wieland Schmied and David Sylvester towards the end of the Seventies,
this exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence
of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.
De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer
father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and
lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied
in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist
painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes.
Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and
poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the
heroes of Surrealism.
This phase of his work – the so-called metaphysical painting – lasted up to around
1918. Subsequently De Chirico changed direction. He wanted to become a classicist
– and almost succeeded.
Info: +39 055 2645155
Exhibition hours: Daily 9 a.m-8 p.m, Thursday 9 a.m-11 p.m
Last admission to the exhibition 1 hour before closing
