Giorgio de Chirico Art Centre

Art centre dedicated to the Surrealist painter born in Volos in 1888

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos in 1888 and left Greece as a young man, going on to develop the Metaphysical painting style that would influence Surrealism and much of twentieth-century art. The city honours its most famous son with this three-storey art centre in the city centre, housed in a restored neoclassical building.

The permanent collection includes works from across de Chirico's long career — he lived until 1978 — with particular focus on the Metaphysical period that made his name: the elongated shadows, the empty piazzas, the faceless mannequins and classical ruins assembled in unsettling proximity. Rotating temporary exhibitions bring in work by other artists, both Greek and international, generally with some connection to the themes of his work. Even if you are not a devotee of Surrealism, the centre is a pleasant space and the backstory — the Greek port city as the unlikely source of one of European modernism's most distinctive visions — is worth knowing about.

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A story
De Chirico grew up in the flat, sun-bleached plains of Thessaly, surrounded by wide skies and the kind of afternoon light that drains shadow from everything. Art historians have long argued that this landscape — empty, monumental, suffused with an almost hallucinatory brightness — is the direct source of the eerie piazzas and long arcade shadows that define his Metaphysical period paintings. Volos, the city of his birth, is the key to understanding one of the most recognisable visual styles of the twentieth century.

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