The Monza Orangerie hosts an anthology entitled “Antonio Ligabue. The man, the artist”, curated by Sandre Parmiggiani, produced and organized by ViDi in collaboration with the Municipality of Monza and the Villa Reale and Monza Park Consortium.
Some of the paintings among his masterpieces are exhibited, such as Leopard with snake (1955-56), Tiger head (1957-58), Fox with bird of prey (kite) 1959 am - 60 pm Crucifixion (early 60s) big (1929) Circus (c. 1941-42), royal tiger, work created in 1941 during the artist's second hospitalization in the San Lazzaro psychiatric hospital in Reggio Emilia. Furthermore, Self-Portrait with Easel (1954-55), Self-Portrait with Flies (1956-57), Self-Portrait with a Scarecrow (1957-58), the mourner Self Portrait (1957)
The exhibition tells us about Ligabue through animals, wild and domestic, and self-portraits, the scenes of rural life or the landscapes of the Po valley, and depictions of castles, churches, spiers and houses with flags flying on the steep roofs of his native Switzerland, where he was born and where he lived until his expulsion in 1919.
Here are the animals of Ligabue, tigers, lions, leopards, gorillas, foxes, eagles are depicted just as they are about to pounce on their prey, with an exasperation of an expressionist nature.
While his self-portraits express a human condition of anguish, desolation and bewilderment. His face expresses pain, the pain of living life as if it were a tragedy, almost as if the self-portrait asks to be looked at for the last time.
The review reserves particular attention to his plastic production, with a nucleus of over twenty bronze sculptures, especially of animals.
The exhibition constitutes a further chapter to bring Ligabue's work back to a correct critical and historical evaluation: an opportunity to reaffirm, beyond the misleading definitions of naive or of an artist marked by madness and who blends visionary exasperation and decorative taste.
For the entire duration of the review, a series of educational activities, meetings and free guided tours for children and adults.
Biographical notes
The sad odyssey of Antonio Ligabue begins on 18 December 1899 in Zurich and ends on 27 May 1965 in Gualtieri, where he landed on 9 August 1919, expelled from Switzerland, after a childhood and adolescence marked by marginalization (at just nine months of age he was entrusted by his mother to another family) and intolerance towards the world around him – at school, however, his passion and talent for drawing had already revealed themselves. Gualtieri's life remained very hard, especially in the early years, in which, in order to be able to live, he worked as a scarriolante on the banks of the Po. He began to paint in the late 1955s, appreciated by rare admirers, including Marino Mazzacurati. In 1961 he held his first personal exhibition in Gonzaga, on the occasion of the millenary fair; in 2005 an exhibition in Rome, at the Galleria La Barcaccia, marks his national consecration ("the Ligabue case"), after an intense artistic activity, often misunderstood and even derided, which over time will nonetheless arouse admiration and interest of collectors, critics and art historians. Among the most recent anthologies, we recall the one, with almost two hundred works, held in 2015 at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia and at Palazzo Bentivoglio di Gualtieri, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his death, and the subsequent exhibition, again in Gualtieri, in XNUMX fifty years after his death.
