Antonio Ligabue - I misteri di una mente

With the exhibition Ligabue. I misteri di una mente is intended to address the general public in order to offer a new interpretation of Antonio Ligabue's work using the lens of art psychology to give a more up-to-date overall picture of the artist and his work. In particular, the intention is to free the artist from the many labels that have been affixed to him over time - be they Naïf, Brut or Outsider - in order to analyse his production in the light of biographical data, and fully show the uniqueness that Ligabue represents within the History of Art.

To give Ligabue his rightful place as an artist, we must first ask ourselves why it is inaccurate to consider him a Naïf or Brut artist. Ligabue as a man was undoubtedly naive, did not possess any particular cultural depth and had pronounced cognitive difficulties. As an artist, however, it cannot be denied that he was prepared and that his work was powerful, original, of great expressive force and certainly not naïf. Although in some works, especially from the early period, one can certainly find elements characteristic of so-called Naïf art, Ligabue seems to make his own a cultural inheritance through which he absorbed and assimilated models from the artists that preceded him.

The Naïf categorisation, as is well known, has ended up labelling a pictorial genre and a way of understanding art that today we can define as reductive and derogatory. In fact, in its original meaning, the term could be used to categorise artists who were considered non-regular, sometimes more for their personality than for their works, and we might be tempted to ascribe Ligabue to this current. But Ligabue was certainly gifted with what is called the reason for art, and although his training was empirical and clearly uneducated, he continued to nourish his expressive sensibility by feeding it with stimuli throughout his artistic life.

The tool of art psychology can come to our aid in analysing Ligabue's work more fully: the artist's lack of aesthetic and ideological superstructures - which would risk complicating and obscuring the accessibility of certain psychic mechanisms - provides us with a magnifying glass to investigate his creative processes in a more direct manner (Ligabue's relationship with self-portraiture is particularly significant from this point of view).

The works of so many irregular artists, precisely because they are uncontaminated by the models of the dominant culture, are examples of authentic, unadulterated art. This is also the case with Dubuffet and Art Brut, with which Ligabue's work has also been associated in the past. The definition of Art Brut is, however, very connoted, and from a critical point of view is linked to a particular group of artists and their poetics. But Ligabue, like other non-regular artists, does not belong to that context, if only for geographical reasons. Analysing Ligabue's biography alongside the stylistic evolution of his work will therefore provide a more three-dimensional and honest picture of the artist.

The exhibition follows a chronological path in which different techniques are mixed. Ligabue was in fact an artist in the classical sense of the term, almost Renaissance, and expressed himself through the most diverse mediums, not favouring one in particular. Particular attention is given in the exhibition to the self-portrait, a medium used by the artist: for Ligabue, self-portraits are experiments to show the evolution of his research and his identity as a painter and a man.

The heart of the exhibition is formed by the 64 artworks that make up a unique and important private Italian collection (18 oils, 30 sculptures, 3 drawings, 21 puntesecche) exhibited for the first time ever in its entirety. The possibility of analysing Ligabue's work through one of the largest collections that preserve his works allows us a new 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.