Giorgio de Chirico

BIOGRAPHY

Greek-born, Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico commenced his artistic career studying at the Athens Polytechnic in 1900 and when the artist’s father passed away in 1905 the family moved to Munich where de Chirico began studying at the Academy of Fine Art. De Chirico returned to Milan, Italy in 1909 and began developing a new visual language in his practice utilising a flatter more abstracted pictorial plane. Arriving in Paris in 1911, de Chirico became part of the Parisian avant garde, making connections with the Cubists and later Surrealist artists.

During this period of dynamic output and experimentation, de Chirico established the notion of Metaphysical Art (Pittura Metafisica) – whereby the artist depicted bold Italian architecture, often void of people but with disquieting and unexpected juxtapositions of objects and forms. These compositions create an imagined world of known objects presented in disjunctive associations beyond the realms of reality.