At the Museo Le Carceri until 30 October over seventy between the artist’s paintings, drawings and sculptures. Vittorio Sgarbi: “he can only measure himself against van Gogh”
In 1999, on the centenary of his birth, a great anthology celebrated (and somehow definitively certified) the long misunderstood genius of Antonio Ligabue (18 December 1899 – 27 May 1965) in Zurich, where the artist was born, and in one of the temples of contemporary art: the Kunsthaus Zürich museum, designed by Karl Moser and Robert Curjel, and built in 1910, where Ligabue’s works had been combined with the masterpieces of Munch, Giacometti, Füssli, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, Monet, Chagall, Picasso, Modigliani, de Chirico, Klee, Braque. Only a few days ago, on May 25, from Bolaffi in Turin, another canvas by Ligabue was sold for over 344 thousand euros: the Leopard with snakean oil on panel from the early 1950s, thus equaled the highest price achieved (in 2019) by a self-portrait by Ligabue himself.
Modernity, but also the ability to surprise every time with its madness and with its reason,
is the center of gravity around which the exhibition revolves
Antonio Ligabue. Another worldin progress at the Asiago Prisons Museum, Vicenza, until 30 October. Curated by Marzio Dall’Acqua and Vittorio Sgarbi (“In his violence, in his animal expressiveness, Ligabue is measured only with Van Gogh, of which he can be considered an Italian variant”), organized by Augusto Agosta Tota, the review proposes
over 70 works including paintings, drawings and sculptures
(
Mountain pasture1928; Leopard with skull1933; Stage stagecoach with castle,1952;
Tiger attacked by the snake, 1953; Self portrait, 1954). Staging one of the major protagonists of Italian art of the twentieth century, a tragically theatrical character and once again very modern in his solitude (as demonstrated by the interpretations they gave of Ligabue Flavio Bucci in 1977 and Elio Germano in 2020).
The exhibition offers a sort of excursus within the three canonical periods into which Ligabue’s artistic production was divided: from domestic animals of the first years to tigers with gaping jaws, monstrous lions, snakes, birds of prey that grab their prey or fight for survival: a real jungle that the artist imagines with hallucinatory fantasy in the woods of the Po. Because the nature painted by Ligabue is essentially the scene of relentless violence and the forests, the plains, the fields and the barns themselves are, for him, places of fighting of all kinds. His paintings reveal anguish, loneliness, the instinctive struggle to survive and get one’s place in the world, the visceral desire for love and sociality that are needs that unite every man and remain current in every age. As shown by the self-portraits exhibited in which Ligabue, the curators explain, “painted his own existential pain shouting it with the urgency of an intense and feral sensitivity”.
But each painting also tells more concrete stories. Because it is precisely the immediacy of his paintings and the expressive force of his painting that create a particular, almost physical bond between Ligabue and the observer. And the popularity / modernity of Ligabue, with his madness and his reason, it is due precisely to his incredible ability to transmit (perhaps unwittingly) aesthetic ideals, sensations, visions from the world.
May 29, 2022 (change May 29, 2022 | 20:03)
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