Giorgio de Chirico

1888 - 1978
Greece

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece, to Italian parents. Although he was the son of a railroad worker, Chirico quickly developed an interest in art. He studied in Athens, Munich and Italy, and settled in Paris in 1912, where he stayed until the outbreak of the First World War.

Until his return to Paris in 1925, where he would live until 1940, Chirico lived in Germany, and was influenced by the surrealism of Alfred Bocklin and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus, in 1917, along with Carlo Carra, he founded the "Scuola Metafisica," a loosely formed group dedicated to the exploration of the mystery and fantasy underlying the surface reality.

A well-regarded pre-Symbolist, Chirico was one of the first artists to evoke a sense of mystery and poetry through the juxtaposition of seemingly unlikely objects. He applied highly individualized, even autobiographical motifs to his art works. His enigmatic groupings somehow suggest subtle and elusive meanings that could be derived if only one had the keys to unlock them.