8 September 2018 – 6 January 2019
Mario Nigro (1917 Pistoia – 1992 Livorno) was one of the main figures in Italian art and its resurgence in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Over the course of his long career as a painter, Nigro developed a very personal form of abstract art, combining structure and colour, precision and inventiveness. His creative path was punctuated by an impressive number of interesting outcomes: with each artistic period Nigro brought to the fore a new and unexpected artistic problem, which he untangled using innovative dimensional, compositional, chromatic and spatial means. In the midst of such expressive variation, Nigro’s utter coherence nonetheless enables us to identify a stable founding principle and a poetic continuity underpinning his work.

Continuity within diversity and the pursuit of a fixed goal despite varying formal outcomes reflect Nigro’s choice to view the active role of his work in history as a responsibility. Nigro felt the need to remain in touch with the events unfolding in the world around him: he sought to translate into images what he termed in an interview in 1969 “aesthetic research as an intimate structure of mankind”.

Due to the topical importance of Nigro’s vision, the last decade in particular has seen all of the relevant actors in the international arts system, from institutions to collectors, increasingly acknowledging the significance of his work.