Metaphysical Art

18 March 2016

Portrait of Madame L. Gartzen 1913,
Oil on canvas, 72,5 x 60 cm.

Private Collection, Roma  The year 1910 marked not only a turning point in de Chirico’s career but also in the history of art. Following several months living in Florence, the artist experienced his first metaphysical revelation before the dominating statue of Dante and the Basilica of Santa Croce in Piazza Santa Croce. It provided him with “the strange impression that I was seeing everything for the first time. Influenced by 19th century philosophical thought, particularly by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Weininger, de Chirico spent the ensuing eight years in Florence (1910-1911), Paris (1911-1915) and Ferrara (1915-1918) lending tangible form to his unique understanding of metaphysics through enigmatic works of his immediate surroundings and everyday objects that harbour an inherent sense of discovery and revelation. His early metaphysical corpus includes eerily empty Italian piazzas with long shadows inhabited by a solitary statue of Ariadne or that of a politician, disquieting faceless mannequins, and claustrophobic interiors filled with random juxtapositions of geometric instruments, maps, bizarre objects and the motif of paintings within paintings.

Highlighting his various periods with examples from his earliest works to last ones, Giorgio de Chirico: The Enigma of the World exhibition took place at the Pera Museum between 24 February - 08 May 2016.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico. Exactly 47 years from now, before she died in the same city and her beloved Mexico, many things would happen; she’d meet Diego Rivera, become a world-renowned artist, and allow many of her fans to dress like her on Halloween. 

Between Impressionism and Orientalism

Between Impressionism and Orientalism

Pera Museum presents an exhibition of French artist Félix Ziem, one of the most original landscape painters of the 19th century. The exhibition Wanderer on the Sea of Light presents Ziem as an artist who left his mark on 19th century painting and who is mostly known for his paintings of Istanbul and Venice, where the city and the sea are intertwined. Through the exhibition, we will be sharing detailed information about the artist and the artworks. 

The First Nudes

The First Nudes

Men were the first nudes in Turkish painting. The majority of these paintings were academic studies executed in oil paint; they were part of the education of artists that had finally attained the opportunity to work from the live model. The gender of the models constituted an obstacle in the way of characterizing these paintings as ‘nudes’.