ANTONIO LIGABUE: The Mysteries of a Mind

Date: Sep 28^th 2024 – Jan 12^th 2025                    Location: Museo Storico della Fanteria – Rome.

Curator: Micol Di Veroli, Dominique Lora, Vittoria Mainoldi.

The exhibition chronicles Antonio Ligabue’s artistic journey through 70 works including sculptures, oils, drawings, and dry points, allowing the visitor to get up close and personal with the artist’s most intimate world. The aim is to offer a new reading of his work. In particular, it aims to free the artist from the many labels that have been attached to him over time-whether those of Naïf, Brut or Outsider – in order to analyze his production in the light of the biographical datum, and fully show the unicum that Ligabue represents within the History of Art.

The exhibition follows a chronological path in which different techniques are mixed. Ligabue was indeed an artist in the classical sense of the term, almost Renaissance, and expressed himself through the most different, not favoring one in particular. Particular attention is given in the exhibition to the self-portrait, a tool much used by the artist: for Ligabue, self-portraits are experiments designed to show the evolution of the research and his identity of painter and man. The heart of the exhibition is represented by the works that compose an important and unique private Italian collection exhibited for the first time ever in its entirety. The opportunity to analyze Ligabue’s work through one of the most nourished that preserve his works, allows an unprecedented look at the artist: That of those who first saw in him the spark of genius and the fragility of the individual. Other loans come from various private Italian collections.

Antonio Ligabue’s artistic research embodies a vision in which imagination represents an alternative key to a broader understanding of the human condition, just as his artistic gesture embodies the ability to perceive and understand the present in the construction of an individual and social identity. In other words, if the world’s tendency is towards standardization, the only way to defend character, diversity and tradition within a global system is to turn to art for decipherment new possibilities and new forms of expression and accessibility to our local culture. In the metaphysics of the natural landscape, the great Italian maestro examines human relationships and finds his own artistic solution, through which each of his compositions becomes a form of meditation on the human condition and the mutability/immutability of the world.