In Bologna from 13 October 2022 , Palazzo Pallavicini hosts a large exhibition entirely dedicated to the father of metaphysical painting, Giorgio de Chirico . The exhibition entitled “De Chirico and the beyond. From the «baroque» season to neo-metaphysics (1938-1978)” curated by Elena Pontiggia and Francesca Bogliolo, is produced and organized by Pallavicini Srl by Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni and Rubens Fogacci in collaboration with the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation and collects a prestigious corpus of works by one of the most influential and recognized painters of the Italian twentieth century.

The exhibition, sponsored by the Emilia-Romagna Region, includes over seventy works from the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation in Rome and reconstructs two important moments in de Chirico's painting: the "baroque" season and the neo-metaphysical season.

The first developed from 1938 to 1968, when de Chirico (who left Paris and returned to Italy in 1939, dividing himself between Milan and Florence, before moving permanently to Rome) was inspired by Rubens and great masters of the caliber of Dürer, Raphael and Delacroix. His works, which are not realist, want to create an ideal and unreal world, a fiction that is truer than reality: "we love the unreal", and again "reality cannot exist in painting because in general it does not exist on earth" , writes de Chirico himself. The "baroque" works behind their apparent naturalism are still meta-physics (lit. "beyond nature"), they represent a metaphysics of nature, that is, a nature that does not exist in nature.

On display are a series of important self-portraits, such as the famous Nude Self-Portrait from 1945 and the emblematic Self-Portrait in the Park with 17th-century costume from 1956. Here the artist wears antique clothes and measures himself against the masters of the past, declaring his distance from modernity and rejects the dogmas of the twentieth century, revealing himself as the first post-modern artist. Other fundamental works of the "Baroque" season are also exhibited, such as Natura morta ariostesca, 1940; The Skater, 1940 (the portrait of his wife Isabella as an allegory of winter); the terracotta Bucefalo, 1940 (one of the first examples of de Chirico sculptor); the Villa Medici series (exhibited in 1945 at the San Silvestro Gallery).