Antonio Ligabue - Lion Fighting a Leopard

Animals are recurring subjects in Antonio Ligabue's paintings. Especially exotic animals (his tigers are famous), which the artist had rarely seen, especially through the occasional circus performance. These subjects, therefore, are interpreted primarily through the artist's imaginative reworking. A way to escape his reality, confined to the banks of the Po River, and travel, through painting, to distant and exotic places.

In his simplification of reality, Ligabue simultaneously grasps its complexity. For this reason, the subject is synthesized in a two-dimensional space, but, at the same time, is constructed through a complex system of lines that takes into account both the volume and the dynamism of the depicted scene. This system of lines also moves across different planes, compensating for the spatial two-dimensionality and recreating it on a conceptual level. The color tends to adhere to a naturalistic rendering, but with excessively intense tones, reminiscent of naive poetics.

Antonio Ligabue was born in Zurich in 1899 and died in Gualtieri in 1965. His entire life was marked by frequent nervous breakdowns. He was hospitalized for the first time in 1917, then expelled from Switzerland and taken to Gualtieri, his relatives' hometown. For a long time, he lived as a beggar on the margins of society, until he landed a job on a construction site on the banks of the Po. It was during this period that he began painting. It was the critic Renato Marino Mazzacurati who recognized his potential and guided him toward his own personal development. His first solo exhibition was held in Rome in 1961. He is considered one of the leading exponents of Naive painting.

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