Antonio Ligabue

Book info: Antonio Ligabue (Paperback, 0 pages) – Skira, 2018. Language: English.

Approximately eighty works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, showcase Ligabue's creative universe, balanced between two main poles: wild and domestic animals, and self-portraits. Ligabue depicts both domestic animals in rustic settings, blending the flat lands of his native Bassa Reggiana with the castles, churches, and steep-roofed houses of his Swiss homeland, and forest and jungle creatures (tigers, lions, leopards, gorillas, foxes, eagles) with a keen understanding of their anatomy, often capturing them as they pounce on prey, with expressive forms and colors, and a meticulous focus on decorative elements. Ligabue's self-portraits are a poignant and poetic highlight, with the artist dominating the foreground and a largely inconsequential landscape in the background, reflecting a persistent human condition of angst, desolation, and disorientation, and a slow march towards the inevitable.