Emi Ligabue - La Settimana Bianca

Since the beginning of her career as a visual artist in the early 1980s, Emi Ligabue has focused her research on everyday objects, from everyday utensils to the icons of modernity and design, first creating sculptures and installations and then two-dimensional works, preferring the technique of collage. Taking and recontextualising images is his signature style and has allowed the artist to freely experiment with mixing genres, and to reflect on the increasingly blurred boundaries between visual and applied arts. In the 65 collages of La settimana bianca (The White Week), the title of the exhibition curated by Melania Gazzotti at the Mutty cultural centre and its catalogue, Emi Ligabue measures himself against a different visual imagery: the mountain, as a relatively recent holiday and winter sports destination. This time, therefore, the subject of investigation is no longer the artefact itself, but rather the visual ensemble of snow-covered peaks, skis, snowshoes and plastic poses, placed within a collective phenomenon of custom - which began in the 1960s and is now consolidated - that thanks to artistic elaboration and interpretation becomes evocation and takes on an iconic perspective, anything but free of irony and provocation, as is the artist's custom.