Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Mystery

Born in Greece at the close of the 19th century, the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico lived to be 90 years old and is credited with influencing the surrealists – Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst both adopted his unique way of seeing.

This exhibition, in collaboration with Bologna’s Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, concentrates less on this earlier moment in his career and more on the sculptures and drawings that came to define him as a modernist. Regardless of time, de Chirico’s overriding themes were always about spatial perception. About our physical place in the world and its possibilities. He studied in Athens (the oneiric tributes never left him) and then Florence and Munich.

They were exciting times, before the Great War altered the literal and metaphysical landscape. A time when he was said to have been led by the symbolist philosophers, in particular, Nietzsche and his belief that ‘underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed’.

His work was a devotion to distorting the view and fooling the eye. The later sculptures shown here are the perfect 3D embodiment of this theme and the chance to see some of them close up, in such a unique setting, is a rare treat. Did he really mean to make Orpheus, Castor and Hector And Andromache look like tailors’ dummies? Or perhaps working models for a science-fiction film? De Chirico wrestled with this later work, believing (rightly in part) that the early pictures were all people ever wanted to see.

The phase of his work known as the so-called Pittura metafisica, which fizzled out in 1918, is not covered by this energetic show – in part because so few authentic pieces still exist from that time. Although there are many self-forgeries (or ‘later’ versions) that he continued to churn out for decades; rather like a rock band still playing their old hits. Like them, he played to the crowd and cashed in. But, as this exhibition shows, he did also continue to produce some rather catchy new numbers, too.

Until 19 April at Estorick Collection Of Modern Italian Art, Canonbury Square, London N1: 020-7704 9522, www.estorickcollection.com