Few modern artists exerted such a trend-setting influence on contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists in Europe as Giorgio de Chirico. In his painting, the artist developed a highly complex pictorial language whose superficial representationalism dissolves on closer inspection into a mysterious world of symbols and allusions. The creative phase of his metaphysical painting, which began in Paris in 1911, reached its climax in Ferrara in northern Italy between 1915 and 1918. The encounter there with Carlo Carrà led in 1917 to the birth of what was later called the "ScuolaMetafisica".
The Staatsgalerie is one of the few museums in Germany to own a masterpiece by de Chirico from this fruitful period in Ferrara. In 2016 - 100 years after its creation - it will form the starting point for a major special exhibition in Stuttgart on the pittura metafisica and its significance for the art of the European avant-garde. On display are numerous masterpieces by de Chirico and Carrà. They meet paintings and drawings by artists of Dadaism, Surrealism, and New Objectivity, thus revealing the international reception of the special visual language of pittura metafisica that followed immediately after its creation. Motifs such as the faceless "manichino" or the "image within an image" appear in numerous works by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and George Grosz, and bear witness to the intensive engagement with de Chirico.
With around 100 top-class loans from all over Germany, Europe and the USA, for example from the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Brera in Milan, this presentation in the Staatsgalerie invites visitors to trace this remarkable artistic phenomenon. It represents one of the most important turning points in the development of 20th century art.