Metaphysics/Metaphysics: Four museums in Milan to reread the legacy of the 20th century

Milan dedicates an exhibition project to Metaphysical Art, articulated in a major exhibition at Palazzo Reale and three chapters hosted in as many museum institutions in the city. Metaphysics/Metaphysics is the title of the initiative, curated by Vincenzo Trione, which proposes an extended reading of the movement born in 1917 in Ferrara, relating the historical protagonists with contemporary artists, architects, photographers and authors who have collected and reworked its legacy. The project is promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Milan and is produced by Palazzo Reale, Museo del Novecento, Grande Brera-Palazzo Citterio and Gallerie d’Italia, with Electa as publisher. The initiative is also part of the cultural program of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The centerpiece of the entire project is the exhibition Modernity and Melancholy set up at Palazzo Reale from January 28 to June 21, 2026, realized with the scientific collaboration of the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation and the Morandi Museum, and with the participation of the Alberto Savinio Archive and the Carlo Carrà Archive. The exhibition brings together more than four hundred works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, design objects, plastic models and architectural models, as well as illustrations, comics, magazines, videos and sound media such as vinyl records. The loans come from more than one hundred and fifty institutions, both public and private, including museums, archives, galleries and international collections.

The itinerary reconstructs the birth and evolution of Metaphysical Art through its main interpreters, from Giorgio de Chirico to Alberto Savinio, from Carlo Carrà to Filippo de Pisis and Giorgio Morandi, and then expands to the artists in Europe and the United States who absorbed and transformed the atmospheres and formal solutions of the movement. The narrative extends to more recent echoes, documenting the influence of metaphysical poetics also in areas such as photography, architecture, cinema, theater, design, fashion, literature, graphic novels and music. The names involved include Mario Sironi, Felice Casorati, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, among others, along with figures closer to the present such as Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis and Francesco Vezzoli. The project also includes references to the architecture of Aldo Rossi, Gio Ponti, Paolo Portoghesi and Frank Gehry, the photography of Mimmo Jodice and Gabriele Basilico, the fashion of Giorgio Armani and Fendi, the cinema of Paolo Sorrentino and Tim Burton, and even the music of Genesis and Pink Floyd.

“Distant and different episodes that seem to have nothing in common, born from the imaginations of artists who are generationally, culturally and linguistically distant,” explains curator Vincenzo Trione. “And yet, even if by secret paths, in a way that is not always entirely intentional, these voices are united by a specific posture. A sort of unmistakable manière de voir, inspired by a lateral, clandestine and perhaps marginal poetic experience, matured more than a century ago in a provincial town, placed outside of history.”

“From Piazza Duomo to Brera are two thousand steps of art: the itinerary that kicks off next Jan. 28 with Metaphysics/Metaphysics in the rooms of Palazzo Reale will touch the Museo del Novecento and the Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza della Scala, to end at Palazzo Citterio,” afferma the Councillor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi. “A sentimental map in the heart of Milan that connects physical spaces and works of art and that refers to an idea of the city as a diffuso museum, traversable even on foot, capable of relating past and present, great masters and contemporary gazes. An ambitious and choral project that restores Metaphysics to its generative force and invites citizens and visitors to rediscover Milan as a place of thought, imagination and vision.”

The second chapter of the project, Milano Metafisica, is housed at the Museo del Novecento, in the Ettore and Claudia Gian Ferrari Archives, is dedicated to the relationship between Metaphysics and Milan and can be visited from January 28 to June 21, 2026. The in-depth study investigates the sometimes unexpected link between some of the protagonists of the group led by de Chirico and the city, considered as an artistic and intellectual hub, but also as a place of experimentation and dialogue between different languages. In the exhibition, a selection of drawings, maquettes, clothing, archival materials and photographs documents the activities of de Chirico, Savinio and Carrà in the Lombard capital and their collaborations with city cultural institutions. Among the materials on display are sketches of sets and costumes made between the 1940s and 1950s for La Scala Theater, as well as historical photographs and preparatory drawings of the Bagni Misteriosi designed for the Milan Triennale.

A focus on Ascolto il tuo cuore, città (I listen to your heart, city), the documentary novel published by Alberto Savinio in 1944, dedicated to Milan and defined by the author himself as a declaration of “carnal” love for the city, also finds its place within this itinerary. The text is accompanied by a series of ten plates created by Mimmo Paladino, entitled Disegni per Savinio (Drawings for Savinio), which translates some of the book’s situations and atmospheres into images. The plates construct a visual sequence that recalls the structure of a drawn film, characterized by a balance between fidelity to the text and autonomous reworking, with an alternation between fragments of writing and visions.

The third chapter unfolds at Gallerie d’Italia - Milan, Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum in Piazza Scala, where a tribute to Giorgio Morandi is presented through Gianni Berengo Gardin ’s photographs dedicated to the painter’s Bologna atelier. The photography project Gianni Berengo Gardin. Giorgio Morandi’s Studio, which can be visited from January 28 to April 6, 2026, dialogues with the works preserved in the museum’s vault, offering a close look at Morandi’s work space and the everyday context in which his still lifes took shape.

From February 6 to April 5, 2026, Grande Brera is participating in the project with an intervention hosted at Palazzo Citterio, where William Kentridge is presented. More Sweetly Play the Dance and Remembering Morandi, an unprecedented homage by William Kentridge to Giorgio Morandi. The South African artist creates a sound video installation flanked by a sequence of cardboard sculptures that reinterpret the everyday objects at the center of Morandi’s research. The intervention proposes an ideal dialogue with the metaphysical works of the Bolognese master preserved at Palazzo Citterio, highlighting Morandi’s formal and conceptual legacy and recalling an expressive practice based on time, memory and rhythm as constituent elements of the image.

The single exhibition catalog is published by Electa. In parallel, on the occasion of Metaphysical/Metaphysical. Modernity and Melancholy, Electa, in collaboration with the National Museum of Photography - MUNAF, presents Tales of Metaphysics, a program of cultural initiatives aimed at visitors to the Palazzo Reale exhibition. From February to June 2026, the calendar includes special visits and conversations designed to bring different disciplines and points of view into dialogue, with the aim of offering new keys to understanding the persistence and transformations of Metaphysics in the contemporary context.

Metaphysics/Metaphysics: Four museums in Milan to reread the legacy of the 20th century

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