Nino Mustica was born in Adrano, in the province of Catania, on 26 August 1946. He grew up in a cultured family: his father, a civil engineer, was originally from Leonforte; his mother, who belonged to an ancient aristocratic family, cultivated a passion for music, literature and the visual arts. The family environment – shared with an older brother and a younger sister – contributed to the formation of an early aesthetic sensibility, which would form the basis of his future artistic research.

The 1980s represented a period of significant research and international collaboration for Mustica. He exhibited in Germany, Greece, Turkey and Spain, often travelling by car from Sicily with a small group of friends. These experiences, which the artist perceived as genuine opportunities for exchange and discovery, instigated a profound reflection on sign, gesture, colour and matter — the four key elements of his pictorial abstraction — in a constant tension between interiority and universal vision.

Nino Mustica is a constant presence in a context that has revolutionised rules, procedures and visual languages. His research underwent a significant expansion in the 1980s, but by the early 1990s, the figure of the painter found himself isolated from the diverse directions of contemporary extra-pictorial practices. Mustica has always prioritised the depth of his research over the question of colour. His work is a clear affirmation of identity, a refusal to compromise that allows him to navigate a constantly changing landscape.

In the 1990s, Nino Mustica established himself as a pioneer in the hybridisation of painting and digital technologies. He created the Evoluzioni pittoriche tridimensionali (Three-dimensional pictorial evolutions), virtual works in 3D and computer graphics. Since 2002, he has transposed these onto watercolour paper with vegetable pigments, translating the immaterial into material signs. From 1996 onward, he created his three-dimensional pictorial forms: fibreglass sculptures that made the digital project tangible. This path was unparalleled in the artistic landscape of the time, placing him alongside other pioneers of 1990s digital art, such as Harold Cohen (with his AARON software), Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Manfred Mohr and the JODI collective. This clearly underlines his avant-garde role in the fusion of digital language and pictorial tradition.

In 2002, Mustica embarked on a new phase of experimentation. On the one hand, he created the performances Skin to Skin (2002) and Nouvelles Réalités (2003). These explored bodily interactions and interpersonal relationships between performance, traditional painting and digital interaction. On the other hand, with Era Eros (2004), he explored the photographic dimension. He captured the essence of desire and intimacy. This was a return to the physicality of the body and matter. These projects expanded his artistic language, blending disciplines and confirming his constant drive for innovation and synthesis of different fields of expression.

In 2006, Mustica expanded his research into design and architecture, integrating physical space into his works through studies in mechanics and engineering. His work explores rotational and translational movements, and culminates in the creation of the Mustica Tower, a project that blends aesthetics and functionality. This confirms his pioneering approach to the intersections between art, space and structure. During this period, Mustica confidently questioned the forces that enable movement and perceived a profound anthropological change in society: a new humanity ready to build and inhabit an artistic concept in which abstract painting translates into functional architecture.

Mustica is a painter of light, capturing the fluid movement of his brush in tangles of colour. He is not an artist who can be pigeonholed within specific local traditions. 'I'm out of context,' he states confidently, with a hint of pride. 'I travel alone.' His art cannot be reduced to the dimension of gesture alone. His hand does not exclude, but rather requires, conceptual interventions aimed at monitoring and guiding the creative impulse, even within a freedom that presupposes the continuity of the discontinuous, the invention of an almost surreal spatiality and the sudden sinking of the surface into all possible dimensions.