With over 100 works including
paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures, a large
exhibition will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of
Antonio Ligabue, among one of the most ingenious and original
Italian artists of the 20th century.
The masterpieces of the Swiss painter will be on display
from May 31 to November 8 in the spaces of the Palazzo
Bentivoglio in the town of Gualtieri in Reggio Emilia, the town
in the Po Valley where the artist lived from 1919 to 1965, the
year of his death.
The important retrospective, titled "Antonio Ligabue
1899-1965", will make up the first step of the activities of the
newly-instituted Fondazione Museo Antonio Ligabue (Antonio
Ligabue Museum Foundation), founded this year with the aim of
preserving and promoting the memory of this extraordinary
artist, marked by a dramatic life tormented by mental illness.
The exhibition was born from the request of the town of
Gualtieri, together with the Banco Emiliano and Girefin Spa, the
Foundation (which will manage the Antonio Ligabue Museum) found
its headquarters the Palazzo Bentivoglio, recently remodeled
following damage it sustained during the 2012 earthquake.
And it is in the spectacular Salone dei Fasti (Hall of
Splendor), also known as the Hall of the Giants, that the
permanent collection of the works of Ligabue will be housed,
along with temporary exhibits promoted by the Museum.
The Foundation's head is Livia Bianchi, assisted by a board
of directors made up of Achille Brunazzi and Stefano Landi,
while the director is Sandro Parmeggiani, art historian and
critic, who was previously the head of Palazzo Magnani, a
16th-century palace housing a permanent fine art collection and
an exhibition space in Reggio Emilia.
Parmeggiani, together with Sergio Negri, is the curator of
this celebratory exhibition, for which approximately 100 works
were chosen, some of which have never before been publicly
shown, among which are 80 oil paintings, 15 drawings, 10
engravings, and 10 sculptures in bronze and terracotta.
The paintings on display, many of which are considered the
artist's best masterpieces, will be subdivided into the three
periods in which Ligabue's art is generally divided (1928-1939;
1939-1952; 1952-1962), and will cover all the themes of his
painting: wild and domestic animals, Swiss and Po Valley
landscapes, interiors, portraits and self-portraits.
This collection of works also reconstructs the troubled
existential odyssey of the artist born in Zurich in 1899.
Forced by authorities to leave Switzerland for his
turbulent life, Antonio Ligabue arrived in 1919 in Gualtieri
(hometown of the man that his mother married in 1901) and the
impact of this new environment immediately revealed itself to be
sad and painful.
The first paintings, in which are revealed an important
interest for natural history museums and animals in general,
date to the end of the 1920s, a period in which, among other
things, Ligabue met Marino Mazzacurati in Gualtieri.
A difficult and tormented life, marked by hostility,
misunderstandings and periods as a patient in psychiatric
hospitals, which Ligabue dedicated entirely to painting and
sculpture, despite widespread derision and lack of appreciation
for his work.
This is another reason why the anthologist of Palazzo
Bentivoglio wants to create a mainstay from which to start over
in an accurate critical and historical evaluation of his work,
capable of highlighting its undeniable value in the context of
Italian and European art, beyond the misleading definition of
"naive" that has for too long accompanied him and has marred
understanding of his work.
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