Giorgio de Chirico: Myth and Mystery, Estorick Collection

The painter/sculptor Giorgio de Chirico was the one of the 20th century art world’s biggest darlings, innovators and nuisances all in one. Italy’s most important Metaphysical painter in his youth, his considerable innovation helped shape Surrealism – until, that is, he turned his back on Modern Art aged 31, never to take it seriously again.

Myth and Mystery, a new sculptural exhibition at the Estorick Collection, surfs these remarkable career highs and lows in a 40-year survey.

Chirico started painting surreal landscapes during the First World War as part of the Scuola metafisica he founded with the painter Carlo Carrà (later of the Futurist movement). His eerie images of sweeping desertscapes, grand Italian architecture, mannequins, characters from antiquity and odd combinations of objects – all rendered with sharply contrasting light and shadow and an uncanny sense of stillness, are some of the most striking works of the 20th Century. Look out for the Mysterious Baths series of paintings - maybe the most delightful example of his surreal compositional jamborees.

In 1919 there was a sea change in his thinking and he avowed a new desire to paint like the Old Masters, specifically the renowned Renaissance draughtsman Luca Signorelli. For the rest of his life he hated Modern Art, and threw himself into sculptures of figures from classical mythology instead. These, notably the beautifully realistic bronze piece Ippolito (Greek Ephebe on Horseback), 1969, make up the body of the exhibition.

But there’s a stylised mannequin-esque look that many of his later sculptures share with his surrealist paintings, not to mention a similar suspenseful beauty. Take a look at Hector and Andromache (1968) and Castor (1973) to see what we mean.

Fascinatingly though, in his lifetime the sculptures didn't live up to his earlier work. So he returned to the old-style metaphysical painting that made him famous in order to cash in. He began claiming some of his real early paintings were forgeries, and from 1933 started to fake his own early work. He flooded the market with “newly rediscovered” pictures painted in the 1930s onwards which he claimed to have found under his bed - leading to a joke that his bed must have been at least six feet high.

See if you can tell which paintings are the ‘self-forgeries’ as you walk around the exhibition. His works are connected by an obsession with the mystical and the metaphysical, but the greater mystery, it seems, are the ideas at play behind Chirico’s life, motives and world. Nothing is as it seems with De Chirico, not even the work itself.