Milan, January 28, 2026 – The most anticipated event of Milan’s exhibition season has officially begun: ‘Metaphysics/Metaphysical: Modernity and Melancholy’. This ambitious and widespread project tells the story of one of the most influential Italian art movements of the 20th century, allowing past masters to dialogue with their contemporary heirs. Opening just before the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the exhibition invites visitors to escape the metropolitan frenzy and immerse themselves in a parallel world where the mundane opens up to unsettling and revealing dreams, much as it did for a handful of now-celebrated artists over a century ago.
A Century of Metaphysical Art Across Four Venues
From January 28 to June 21, 2026, the works of Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Alberto Savinio, Filippo De Pisis, and Giorgio Morandi will be on display at Palazzo Reale, featuring over 400 pieces on loan from approximately 150 Italian and international collections. Three additional exhibition chapters await the public at the Museo del Novecento, Palazzo Citterio, and Gallerie d’Italia, completing the fresco of a phenomenon that, surprisingly, still resonates in contemporary culture.
Curated by Vincenzo Trione, the heart of the project at Palazzo Reale begins its narrative in 1917, when the “quasi-movement” of Metaphysical Art took its first steps in Ferrara, initiating one of the most compelling and controversial chapters in the history of European avant-gardes. As the Great War ravaged Europe, “some of the greatest solitaries of Italian art” gathered to tear through the veil of convention, unleashing the mystery hidden in the interstices of everyday reality and transfiguring the familiar into suspended and disquieting atmospheres. In critical dialogue with the experiments of Cubists, Futurists, and Dadaists, the inventors of Metaphysical Art questioned distant artistic memories and traditions without nostalgia.
The Enduring Legacy of Metaphysical Painters
“This exhibition traces a unique story. And, at the same time, it documents a plot twist. Due to an impossible-to-predict cabal, the metaphysical painters became involuntary fathers of large regions of 20th and 21st-century arts,” explains Trione. “Squares and statues, arches and porticoes, towers and shadows, still lifes and mannequins have traversed significant passages in art, architecture, photography, design, fashion, cinema, theatre, graphic novels, music, literature. It is a vocabulary that has now become part of our lexicon.”
This is why, among the 400 works on display, visitors to Palazzo Reale will find paintings, sculptures, and drawings, but also design objects, photographs, videos, architectural models, vinyl records, and comics. The protagonists of the historical group of metaphysicians-De Chirico, Savinio, Carrà, De Pisis, Morandi-are joined by artists who, in different eras, were inspired by their research, from Mario Sironi to Felice Casorati, from René Magritte to Max Ernst, from Salvador Dalí to Andy Warhol, and then Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, Francesco Vezzoli, Aldo Rossi, Gio Ponti, Paolo Portoghesi, Frank Gehry, Mimmo Jodice, Gabriele Basilico, up to Giorgio Armani, Fendi, Paolo Sorrentino, Tim Burton, Genesis, and Pink Floyd.
“Sequences of an impossible film,” the curator continues, “Distant and diverse episodes that seem to have nothing in common, born from the imagination of artists distant in terms of generation, culture, and language. And yet, albeit through secret paths, not always entirely intentionally, these voices are united by a specific posture. A kind of unmistakable manière de voir, inspired by a lateral, clandestine, and perhaps marginal poetic experience, matured more than a century ago in a provincial city, outside of history.”
Milan and Metaphysics at Museo del Novecento
The rest of the narrative pulsates in the heart of the Lombard capital, within those “two thousand steps of art” between Piazza Duomo and Brera. The Museo del Novecento investigates the link between Metaphysics and Milan, a city that was then an artistic and intellectual crossroads, a laboratory for experimentation and dialogue between the arts. Drawings, maquettes, clothes, archival materials, and photographs recall the activities of De Chirico, Carrà, and Savinio in the city, from the scenographies created for the Teatro alla Scala to the project for the Bagni Misteriosi for the Triennale. Among the exhibition’s highlights is Alberto Savinio’s work Ascolto il tuo cuore, città (1944), which encapsulates “all the ‘carnal’ love a man can have [for] a city.” A series of ten drawings by Mimmo Paladino, titled Disegni per Savinio, a kind of neo-realist drawn film oscillating between fidelity and betrayal, fragments of writings and visions, is dedicated to this documentary novel.
Berengo Gardin’s Homage to Giorgio Morandi at Gallerie d’Italia
The Intesa Sanpaolo Galleries in Piazza Scala pay homage to Giorgio Morandi through photographs taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin in the painter’s historic Bologna studio in Via Fondazza: a “journey into an intimate and secluded room” where a poetics based on the conviction that “there is nothing more abstract than the visible” took shape. “The enigma is here, beside us,” assert the vases and bottles in austere colors on Morandi’s canvases, fixed in eternal poses and guarded by a misty light, touched by shadows. Berengo Gardin seems to identify a spiritual father in the still-life painter, who taught how to glimpse the mystery hidden in the folds of life, to grasp the poetry enclosed in small things, to make the dust sing.
William Kentridge for Grande Brera at Palazzo Citterio
Morandi is also a protagonist at Palazzo Citterio, in the project realized by William Kentridge for the Grande Brera. The South African artist’s intervention unfolds in two moments: a sound video installation and a sequence of cardboard sculptures, which reinterpret the objects at the center of Morandi’s still lifes in an ideal dialogue with the metaphysical works of the Bolognese master preserved at Palazzo Citterio. The work highlights the formal and conceptual legacy of the 20th-century painter, recovering an expressive practice that transforms time, rhythm, and memory into visual material.
