Panel: 'Giorgio de Chirico, Horses: The Death of a Rider’

Giorgio de Chirico: Horses, The Death of a Rider considers the artist's embrace of the horse as a pivotal subject that would populate his art for six decades. The canvases on view manifest the virtuosity of de Chirico’s pictorial language, which mingles the modernity of his lived experiences with a devotion to the immortal power of classical antiquity, and which inhabited the artist’s the imagination and shaped his vision. Spanning nearly 50 years, from the late 1920s through 1970, de Chirico’s horse paintings trace the evolution of his world and oeuvre, emblematizing a rapturous unity of the ancient and the modern.

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Bui has organized over 70 exhibitions since 2000 including Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine, and at seven venues across New York in 2022. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fountain House, Center for Fiction, Floating Forest Residency Program, Mildred’s Lane, Denniston Hill, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary. He was a senior critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA, and has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Bui was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021. Bui lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Caws' many areas of interest in 20th-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Her recent written work includes the catalogue raisonné for Kay Sage; Alice Rahon: Shapeshifter; and Mina Loy: Apology of Genius.

Robert Storr is a preeminent art critic, curator, artist, and educator is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has written numerous catalogues, articles, and books on major 20th and 21st-century artists. He was the first American to serve as visual arts director of the Venice Biennale and has been researching and writing on Philip Guston for more than three decades.

Vito Schnabel Gallery - 455 W 19th Street, New York

June 28, 2023