Antonio Ligabue goes on display in Fermo, with his fierce beasts and self-portraits

From December 6, 2023 to May 5, 2024, the Palazzo dei Priori in Fermo will host the exhibition Wild Spirits. Antonio Ligabue and the Eternal Hunt, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Marzio Dall’Acqua. More than 40 works, including two previously unpublished ones, are on display for the occasion.

The exhibition is meant to be an anthology of ferocious beasts struggling for survival. The nature painted by Ligabue is the scene of relentless violence. For Ligabue, being self-taught means following his own, instinctive language, outside the academy. His, from the very beginning, is a hand-to-hand with the canvas, in a visionary dimension, which has nothing to do with Surrealism, and which represents, through the archetypes of the forest, the jungle, the farmers’ land, the river, the primary truth of a man without history. To liberate instincts, drives, desires, and to mimic the tiger’s scream to better represent it, is a liberation as it was, for the painter-hunters, in the caves of Lascaux.

Ligabue measures himself against these primal images. Man’s strength manifests itself as animal instinct. What is singular about Ligabue is that he does not identify a source of inspiration or a transcription of artistic and literary models. His painting arises as a need for expression, through an imagination that has remained childlike. His only source of inspiration is the world of animals in captivity, and discomfort is the psychological condition of the artist.

In the self-portraits, on the other hand, Ligabue shows his inner world. He beats his head with a stone, trying to drive away evil spirits. The self-portrait is not a form of narcissism, it expresses the need to understand himself better, in a process of self-analysis. Self-portraiture is the image of malaise, and Ligabue is keen to make it known. Sometimes more quietly he rides a motorcycle, an obvious metaphor for an animal in the forest. Another time he appears to us as a hunter, solemn before the canvas. More often he is shown half-length, looking hallucinated or humiliated. In those series, Ligabue wants to tell us about himself and an inner world. Ligabue’s painting is a metaphorical projection of the world in its boiling state, of violence implied in force. Fox, tiger, lion, leopard, snake, big spider, gorilla and, sometimes quiet sometimes threatening, Ligabue too. The animals he sees in the forest are symbols of strength, of energy, symbols of a desire for freedom, for redemption. A humiliated and marginalized man, as a painter he asserts himself and wins through the glorious power of the animal. Ligabue continues always to be one of the most popular Italian artists of the 20th century.

“Ligabue after and beyond the legend today represents a nature in all its complexity, in the biological balance between different kingdoms and species, and the exhibition represents this,” writes Marzio Dall’Acqua. “Ligabue’s world is between the present and the disappearance of the past, if the current inability to react to the climate crisis continues. He intuited the struggle for life as a founding moment of being and beingness, in the disturbing total, definitive relationship of suspension between life and death. Extraordinary moment together everyday, in the sense that it belonged to the possible events of every day, in every latitude and with any living being, which was a constitutive part of the survival drives.”

“Antonio Ligabue is more than a painter and more than an artist. He overflows its boundaries; he does not represent, he does not illustrate, he does not portray but prolongs life in painting. Ligabue describes a world; he has no other interest. There is no fable: there is anger, there is suffering, there is exaltation,” explains Vittorio Sgarbi.

The new exhibition season is promoted by the Marche Region and the City of Fermo with the contribution of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fermo and in collaboration with Ligabue art projects and Mus-e del Fermano. Sponsors of the event are Eurobuilding, Giano, CFL, Violoni Srl, ACRA Carifermo, Il Faro and La Cascina. The organization is entrusted to Maggioli Culture and Tourism.

For info: www.fermomusei.it

Hours: Tuesday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 6 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 7 p.m. Closed Mondays.
Tickets: Full 8euro, reduced 6 euro (14-25 year olds, groups of more than 15 people, FAI members, Touring Club Italia members, Italia Nostra members); free under 13, disabled, Icom members, journalists with badges. The ticket also includes admission to the city’s museum circuit.

Image: Antonio Ligabue, Cockfight (1945; oil on canvas, 42 x 56 cm)

Antonio Ligabue goes on display in Fermo, with his fierce beasts and self-portraits

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