curated by Sandro Parmiggiani and Sergio Negri

Palazzo Ducale in Genoa hosts an anthological exhibition that traces the human and creative story of Antonio Ligabue, one of the most brilliant and original authors of the Italian twentieth century. The exhibition itinerary winds between the two main poles within which Ligabue's creative universe develops: animals, wild and domestic, and self-portraits. The self-portraits constitute a vein of the highest and most bitter poetry in the art of Ligabue.

In them, the painter is placed in the foreground, almost occupying the entire space of the scene, against the background of a landscape that almost always, with rare exceptions, seems to be a completely irrelevant detail. His portraits of himself epitomize a perennial and constant human condition of anguish, desolation and bewilderment, a slow path towards the final outcome; his face expresses pain, fatigue, dismay, the pain of living; every relationship with the world seems to have been forever severed, as if the artist could now only tell, for one last time, the tragedy of a face and a look, which does not care to see the things around it, but who asks, at least for once, to be looked at.