“Portraiture, a somewhat unadventurous subject, is superseded by a sense of surprise and discovery…”
Giorgio de Chirico, Reflections on Ancient Painting, 1921

The 31 works of art, including installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs shed new light in the rooms in which Giorgio and Isa de Chirico lived, functioning as “testimony to the role that de Chirico has played and continues to play in contemporary art”.[2]

“365 days of provocation”[3] during which, works by different artists were added, offering new occasions for a confrontation of ideas.Inaugurated on 27 January 2012, the show was intentionally set up as an itinerary upon which the visitor, accompanied by a House-museum guide and with a map indicating the individual works, was able to “loose themselves” in the home of the Pictor Optimus in the discovery of the contemporary works.

Over the course of the year, prominent art critics, curators and professors such as Laura Cherubini, Stefano Chiodi, Ester Coen, Cristiana Perrella and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, gave guided tours of the exhibition through the rooms in which the Maestro lived the last 30 years of his life, on occasion of the installation of a new work.

“This dwelling is the portrait of the artist and it is with this in mind that I asked the artists to interpret it” declared Lo Pinto. “We are all here ‘impersonating’ Giorgio, with all due respect. I imagined it as a divertissement.”

In D’Après Giorgio, contemporary art thus intertwined with modern art and vice versa, reaffirming the indisputable value and importance of Giorgio de Chirico’s role as both a “guardian of tradition” and a precursor of contemporary art. It suffices to take his late Neometaphysical period into consideration, or his Mysterious Baths Fountain, a “Pop-art” work of 1973, executed when the artist was 85 years old.

Never before has the heterogeneous outside world entered into the de Chirico home in this way: artists, scholars, the young and old, visited Palazzetto Borgognoni with curiosity, passion and surprise.

The exhibition was well received by both the public and the press. International newspapers such as Corriera della Sera, Il Messaggero, Artview, Artforum, Expresso, Il Venerdì, Journal, D Donna, and others, published articles underlining the importance of this project, which came into being in synergy with Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.

Luca Lo Pinto’s project, in fact, opened a door between the two worlds of Modern and Contemporary Art, which are not so distant after all. “Opening the Giorgio de Chirico House-museum, a unique reality, to the wider public thus proved a good idea”.[4]

For a list of the artists who took part in the project