Two horses on the seashore, early 1970s, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm
Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Roma © Giorgio de Chirico, by SIAE 2025.

The Disquieting Muses (Le muse inquietanti)
Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Roma © Giorgio de Chirico, by SIAE 2025.

Metaphysical Vision of New York (Visione metafisica di New York)
Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Roma © Giorgio de Chirico, by SIAE 2025.

Modena presents a major exhibition dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico, a pivotal figure of twentieth-century art and founder of Metaphysics. Giorgio de Chirico. The Last Metaphysics, curated by Elena Pontiggia, brings together fifty works from the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation, offering a close look at the concluding decade of the artist’s career, from 1968 to 1978. In these years, now in his eighties, de Chirico astonishes the art world with a renewed youthful gaze: rather than merely repeating his early inventions, he returns to them in order to transform them, revealing new meanings. In this mature phase, de Chirico revisits his most iconic motifs — the Italian squares, the mannequins, the metaphysical interiors, the horses on the shore — but reframes them with a brighter palette, sharper constructions and a new irony, far from the tragic melancholy of his early period. This is the season of Neometaphysics, a term coined in 1970 by the critic Wieland Schmied. Here, the image no longer evokes only mystery and unease: it becomes a conscious play of variations, quotations and transformations. Works such as Ettore e Andromaca, L’astrologo e Sole sul cavalletto embody this balance between thought and lightness, between memory and invention. Between 1968 and 1978, de Chirico definitively leaves behind his more overtly baroque phase and returns to his original enigmas, reinventing them through new formal rhythms. His irony becomes more pronounced, his colours brighter, the cadence of his compositions more playful — elements that mark a clear distance from the nihilistic vision of the 1910s, when Metaphysics expressed the incomprehensibility and absurdity of existence, in dialogue with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In the final years of his long life, this sentiment softens and becomes the subject of a more measured reflection. With quiet wisdom and an ironic levity, de Chirico revisits the themes of his past, transforming them into more serene images in which a subtle melancholy remains, yet a new clarity prevails — the ultimate form of the metaphysical enigma.