Where and when
Wednesday 25 November at 5.30pm
Giuseppe di Natale
De Chirico a Ferrara. Metafisica e avanguardie Conference in cooperation with Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara
Metaphysical painting was, together with futurism, the most important Italian contribution to European art of the first twenty years of the twentieth century, thanks to the crucial role it played in the development of dadaism, Surrealism, German painting of the twenties and for the influences that later were decisive for the twentieth century Italian. As part of the collaboration between Florence and Ferrara, Giuseppe Di Natale, Curator of the Ferrara Arte Foundation and Palazzo dei Diamanti, will present the exhibition project De Chirico in Ferrara. Metaphysics and avant-garde, analyzing some works that have marked the metaphysical season and contextualizing them in the national artistic panorama.
A hundred years after their creation, the rare masterpieces that Giorgio de Chirico painted in the city of Este return to Ferrara when, following the outbreak of the First World War, between 1915 and 1918, the artist, after a visit to Florence, stayed in the Emilian city to serve in the military.
The exhibition, the first in an absolute sense dedicated to the investigation of this crucial period of art of the twentieth century, presents the most complete exhibition that has ever been seen of the metaphysical works painted in Ferrara by de Chirico and his friend-enemy, companion and competitor, Carlo Carrà. The small rooms with vertiginous perspectives, the sweets, the iconography of the painting in the painting, the famous tailoring mannequins, the silent squares, are the themes around which the exhibition revolves, which also documents the profound influence that the works of Ferrara had in those years on Giorgio Morandi and Filippo de Pisis, and soon after on the artists of the European avant-garde like Man Ray, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.
Giuseppe Di Natale
(Bari, 1974) studied at the University of Florence, where he obtained his PhD in Art History and specialized in Contemporary Art History at the University of Siena. He has carried out research at the University of Florence and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris and has attended advanced courses in museology at the Ecole du Louvre. He has collaborated with essays and fact sheets on various catalogues of exhibitions in Italy and abroad, published the results of his studies in international scientific journals and participated in numerous conferences in Europe, the United States and Japan. Since 2013 he has been Curator of the Ferrara Arte Foundation and Palazzo dei Diamanti.
DE CHIRICO A FERRARA. Metafisica e avanguardie Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti ǀ 14 november 2015 – 28 february 2016
Exhibition curated by Paolo Baldacci e Gerd Roos, organised by Fondazione Ferrara Arte e dalla Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in collaboration with l’Archivio dell’Arte Metafisica di Milano / Berlino.
www.palazzodiamanti.it