Antonio Ligabue, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century art, was a great expressionist, on a footing with Van Gogh and Munch. Some one hundred fifty artworks, an exemplary exploration of all the artist’s different souls: an ample selection of his renowned oil paintings, a core group of drawings and engravings, and a number of his intense sculptures, made from the original in the clay of his beloved Po River, clay that the artist chewed at length to render it more easily workable.

A life spent in contact with the animal universe that he loved so well, a universe that he portrayed with a rigorous anatomical study, imitating the cries and roars of wild beasts as he painted them in frantic colors, in a visionary quest for identity. From the housecats and domestic pets of the early years to the tigers with gaping maws, the monstrous lions, the snakes, the birds of prey clutching their prey or battling for survival: a genuine full-fledged jungle that the artist imagined with hallucinatory fantasies populating the forests along the banks of the Po.

It was particularly in his self-portraits that Ligabue painted his own existential pain and grief, shouting it out with the urgency of a feral and intense sensibility. It is the torment of a soul that, through the grace of painting, found its own voice, its ultimate redemption.