Dossier exhibition on Antonio Ligabue in Modena, starting with the collection of BPER Banca

There is time until February 5, 2023, to visit the exhibition dedicated to Antonio Ligabue at the BPER Banca Gallery in Modena. Antonio Ligabue. The Shadowless Hour. Recognition as an artist and as a person, this is the title of the exhibition, is curated by Sandro Parmiggiani and features four paintings that belong to BPER Banca’s art collection, acquired following the incorporation of the UBI Banca business unit. Alongside these, a selection of works from private collections is on view to the public, with the aim of retracing the main themes addressed by the artist from Gualtieri in his paintings: from wild animal fights to self-portraits and scenes of work in the fields.

On display are a total of about twenty paintings, made from 1929 until the last period of the artist’s activity, who from November 1962 could no longer paint for health reasons. In fact, the exhibition aims to present the artist’s biographical story, from his exile from Switzerland to his forced hospitalizations in a psychiatric hospital, thus tying in with the theme of justice, to which this year’s festivalfilosophy, held from September 16 to 18, 2022, of which BPER Banca is the main sponsor, was dedicated.

Works from BPER Bank’s art collection include Lioness with Zebra (1959-60) and Self-Portrait with Easel (1954-55). If the former canvas testifies to the artist’s attention to wild animals, whose anatomies are defined from images retrieved from zoology books and popular prints, the latter depicts Ligabue himself in the act of painting a rooster in the open countryside, where nature is represented in all its primordial vitality. Also on display is Plowing with Oxen (1953-54), in which a farmer is seen from behind laboriously pushing a plow pulled by two white oxen over barren ground, while a verdant landscape and a city can be seen in the distance. Finally, Return from the Fields with Castle (1955-57) conceals an autobiographical detail: in the background, beyond the farmer, horses and dog returning to the village, is painted a lake at the center of which towers a castle with spires and weathervanes in the wind, perhaps a reminder of his native Switzerland.

The exhibition catalog is enriched by some documentary evidence from theArchives of the former San Lazzaro Psychiatric Hospital in Reggio Emilia, collected and selected thanks to the person in charge, Chiara Bombardieri, who reconstructs Ligabue’s personal history and his tormented psychiatric life.

“If one looks at Ligabue’s work as a whole,” writes the curator, “one realizes that he is essentially a tragic artist, who has often represented the most dramatic and painful aspect of life: the struggle to survive or to assert oneself, in which a victim succumbs to the executioner and is sacrificed; the slow journey of his human likeness toward the final outcome. Of course, there are also the scenes of work in the fields, with peasants and livestock, and domesticated animals, but in his self-portraits the tragic vision is exercised first of all on the self, on the ungainly man, who seems to have some point of tangency with the animal. After all, Ligabue saw animals, the domesticated and the ferocious, as a constitutive, essential part of creation, which he undertook to save in a sort of ’pictorial ark,’ convinced that a soul also palpitated in them and that they were an essential part, along with vegetation, of creation.” “Antonio,” Parmiggiani concludes, “seems to plummet, for most of his life, into an abyss of pain and loneliness, within which he is forced to lead most of his existence. He never succumbs, however, to the temptation of surrender, of severing the link with existence, of ’rejecting life,’ when he comes to choose a decisive detachment from daily suffering. Instead, he always seeks to laboriously climb back up the slippery walls of that abyss, constantly in search of a dignity and recognition that he feels is due to him.”

Sponsored by The Gallery of BPER Bank, the exhibition is open free of charge every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

For all info: https://www.lagalleriabper.it/

Pictured is the layout of the exhibition at La Galleria di BPER Banca, Modena

Dossier exhibition on Antonio Ligabue in Modena, starting with the collection of BPER Banca

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