The Center for Italian Modern Art Fellow Giovanni Casini leads a conversation on Giorgio de Chirico with artists Lisa Yuskavage, Stephen Ellis, and Matvey Levenstein.
Giorgio de Chirico’s wide-ranging body of work, especially his neo-baroque late paintings, has historically baffled critics, and the often contradictory developments of his long artistic career have made it difficult to situate his work within established narratives of modernism. MoMA’s 1982 retrospective, held a few years after the artist’s death, neatly omitted or discounted some two-thirds of the artist’s career, choosing to highlight the Metaphysical period — and showing how problematic the definition of a late de Chirico is. These later works, however, with their dense art historical references, methods of replication or (self-)citation, and ironic approach to painting, have drawn the eye of many contemporary practitioners (including of course Giulio Paolini, one of the subjects of CIMA’s exhibition). The blatantly kitsch taste of de Chirico’s late self-portraits, together with the negation of originality and uniqueness, as well as his pursuit of appropriation and the copy became especially relevant in relation to artistic practices developed in the 1980s.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
6pm to 8pm
Center for Italian Modern Art
421 Broome Street, Floor 4
New York, NY
$10 guests; free for CIMA members and students with valid ID. Reserve tickets here.