More than 90 works by Antonio Ligabue on display in Turin, including paintings, drawings and sculptures

The Ligabue exhibition, curated by Giovanni Faccenda, produced by SM.ART, with creative and production direction by WeAreBeside, and the first realized with the Augusto Agosta Tota Foundation for Antonio Ligabue, is on view at the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin until May 26, 2024, almost a year after the death of Augusto Agosta Tota, who was Ligabue’s friend, promoter and scholar.

On display are more than ninety works by the artist, including 71 paintings, eight sculptures and 13 drawings, with the aim of illustrating his life, psyche and tormented history through eight exhibition rooms. The works come from private collections and range from the famous self-portraits to the 1953 Tiger’s Head and 1955 Leopard, from the 1954 Motorcyclist to the 1959 Crossing of Siberia; from the 1935 sculptures Lion and Lioness to the 1938 Panther and 1940 Crouching Lioness to the 1956 Bust of Gorilla; from drawings with animal figures to the 1955 PencilSelf-Portrait.

“Art, when it was possible for him or he himself chose, voluntarily, to practice it, represented for Ligabue not already a therapeutic itinerary or a salvific escape from his own, irremediable, existential torments, but the narrative, crude, of the same, through witty allegories characterized by the presence of his beloved animals: tigers, vipers, dogs, flies, bees,” the curator explains. “Passionate statements, indeed, of those who, in everyday life, drowned, on the contrary, in the most torrid silence: that, terrible, caused by those who, despising you, do not even address a word to you and, if they do, it is, this, only an expression of meanness, insult, derision. Molding clay, drawing on sheets of paper kept hidden like a treasure or painting at the easel, obsessively looking at one’s own image reflected in the nearby mirror, livid after repeatedly hitting one’s nose with a stone (so that was more aquiline) or his temples bleeding (to let out the Evil he sensed lacerating his mind), was, all this, for Ligabue, the only way to escape, at least temporarily, from his own, fatal, earthly odyssey.”

“The Foundation,” declare Simona and Cinzia Agosta Tota, “finds its origin and continuity in the decades-long activity carried out by Augusto Agosta Tota, our father who, since 1983 has dedicated passion, research and studies, succeeding in creating a reality that has immediately become a point of reference for those who approach Antonio Ligabue with critical, cultural and scientific interest.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by BesideBooks, with critical text by Giovanni Faccenda, and texts by Simona and Cinzia Agosta Tota, Francesca Biagioli, Samantha Patorno and Manlio Polzella.

For info: www.mostraligabuetorino.com

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.(last admission 7 p.m.). Closed Mondays, except holidays.

Antonio Ligabue,

More than 90 works by Antonio Ligabue on display in Turin, including paintings, drawings and sculptures

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