Nino Mustica was born in Adrano, in the province of Catania, on 26th August 1946.

His father was a construction engineer, originally from Leonforte, a town in the province of Enna on the southern slopes of the Erei mountains, south of Mount Altesina. His mother, who comes from an aristocratic family in Adrano, is passionate about literature, music and painting. He has a brother, Gaetano, who is six years older, and a younger sister, Mariella, who was born ten years after the eldest.

I believe that Sicily gave me a sense of humanity and sociability, the pleasure of being with others, of helping each other, of understanding the world, of being in contact with nature and people, as happened in the small village in the Sicilian interior where I lived as a child. When I was fifteen I went to the city and things changed. [i]

At fourteen, he left his father’s house and moved to Catania, about thirty kilometres away, to attend art school. The choice was a natural one, in line with his inclinations, but it was difficult for his father, who would have liked Nino to follow his path and study classics: in fact, he attended high school for a year, but failed.
In Catania, Nino joined his brother Gaetano, who was studying law, and they lived together in a boarding house. These were years of hardship, their relationship with their father was difficult and Gaetano combined his university studies with odd jobs to be able to afford to support his brother and allow him some fun.

My mother painted, my father was an engineer, I wanted to be an architect, but I painted, among other things I studied painting. I attended the Art Institute with Pippo Giuffrida, a good painting teacher who made me understand the meaning and emotion of colour: a remarkable artist, even if little known, like others I happened to meet and spend time with in these early years of artistic learning.


I was undecided whether to study architecture or painting, I believe in the structure of things. For me, structure means architecture. Science is an important research for my way of making art, but I am also very close to the world of fantasy and science fiction.

[i] Claudio Cerritelli, Dialogo per conoscere Mustica, in Claudio Cerritelli (ed.), Nino Mustica. Arie colorate, Mazzotta, Milan 1993,
 p. 22

In 1964, at the age of 18, he moved to Rome to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. He studied calligraphy techniques with Mino Maccari. The following year, in 1965, the whole family left the province and moved to Catania.

To tell the truth it wasn’t an exciting experience, at the Academy I learnt nothing except how to live in an interesting city like Rome was at the time. I was able to get to know the art of the great masters, I saw exhibitions by artists who impressed me, from Sanfilippo to Novelli. The engraving course I took with Maccari gave me something, and I really like this technique, but I’m also interested in fresco and encaustic, almost forgotten techniques that I consider important for a complete pictorial expression.


My first paintings were figurative. They were mostly tempera on paper, small in size and brightly coloured. The titles are descriptive or evocative, the subjects are interpreted instinctively, with themes of fantastic realism. Recurring animals (Arena, 1965; Il gallo rosso, 1965), female figures (Trasognata, 1964; Donna del sud, 1964; In cucina, 1965; Interno esterno, 1966; Nuda al sole, 1967; Silenziosa nostalgia, 1967; L’aristocratica, 1968; L’ultimo sole, 1968), childhood memories (Embrione, 1964; Cavallina, 1964; Memorie, 1967; Mia madre, io 1967), with the Sicilian landscape in the background.

In addition, he commenced the production of depictions of scenes of social life, with a focus on issues of customs, associated with his homeland or with current events. Article 587, 1964, portrays the theme of marital infidelity and its subsequent repercussions, while A Martin Luther King, 1966, pays homage to the prominent leader of the African-American civil rights movement.

He experimented with woodcut, linocut and etching. In these works, the relationship with the image is harsher, accentuated by the use of only black and white. His graphic research is of great importance: he mastered the techniques so much that, on his return to Catania, he also installed a press in his studio and supervised the engraving productions of other artists.

For Mustica – and right from his first works, the figurative experiences of his years as an apprentice, a substantially and dramatically expressive figuration, up to his arrival in a decidedly abstract-informal area – the relationship with his land was epidermal. And that is to say, dictated by the recovery of minimal sensations, of ‘airs’ that activate memories, like invisible signs left by time, like the blue made luminous by the fresh north wind that blows on the shores of the Ionian coast. [i]

[i] Massimo Bignardi, Arie colorate in Claudio Cerritelli (ed.), op. cit., p. 6

In 1968 he married Anna Rita Maccarone, with whom he had a son, Alessandro, in 1970. The relationship ended shortly afterwards. In 1973 he met Anna Amato, his partner until 1982.

After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1969, he returned to Sicily, where he began teaching painting at the Art Institute of Catania until 1991. In parallel to his teaching, he practised painting in two studios: first at 181 Via Imbriani, then at 4 Via Amore.

I taught with great enthusiasm. The students were on first-name terms with me. There were no more professors or registers. We worked and experimented together. I was among the first in Catania to revolutionise the teaching of art subjects.

The works from the late sixties and early seventies maintain the figurative imprint: he paints landscapes, nature, animals, solitary figures. The eyes are often circled, full of melancholy (Rabbia, 1968; Silenzio, 1969; Mia sorella in cucina, 1970;Inizio di primavera, 1970; Silenziosa e sola, 1971; Tre amori, 1973), which Mustica expressly declares and recognises. The titles reveal the link with natural phenomena and the environment, but in the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures the beginning of a decompositional vision is announced: the lines disintegrate, the structures are less defined and recognisable, while the colours remain bright and warm.

His decision to paint as a form congenial to his chromatic vitality came early, in the mid-sixties, when Mustica entered the art world through the difficult and provincial reality of his city, Catania. His initial attempts were linked to the figurative realism movement that strongly influenced the pictorial training of a young artist in Sicily, and not only in those days.However, figuration was for Mustica an instinctive way of painting, his relationship with the cultural environment that grew around artistic models such as Emilio Greco or Renato Guttuso was occasional and not systematic, in short, very rare. On the other hand, he intensely desired to capture the immediate emotion of the sign and the personal invention of colour in the expressive instrument of the ‘figure’, that is to say aspects unrelated to the rhetoric of figurative realism. It’s not that the young Mustica is unfamiliar with the models of this cultural area, but he manages to translate them into free interpretations, ranging from Sicilian art forms linked to storytellers to figures from the peasant world. What prevails is the mythology of the landscape, the sense of colour as joy and vitality, the idea of a chromatic sentiment that the extraordinary land of Sicily suggests as a place of meditation and creation of form.

[i] Claudio Cerritelli, Il sentimento cromatico 1980-1989, in Claudio Cerritelli and Tonko Maroević (ed.), Mustica 1980-1995, Hefti Edizioni, Milan, pp. 14-15

From the mid-1970s, the planes overlap and the colours settle. The negation of the figure began with an informal impulse, through the decomposition of the image, and then stabilised in the search for the abstract origins of the sign or colour. He introduced the ecoline and the awl into his work, engraving and scratching the surfaces. The figures became increasingly difficult to identify, except for the titles, which retained a descriptive function (L’albero, 1974; L’aquilone, 1974; La nuvola, 1974; Il tuono, 1974). The series of Volti (1974) anticipates the idea of cycles and seriality, a theme and working method that would recur in his production in the following years.

During this period, the artist’s main references were the Fauves, Matisse, Picasso and German Expressionism.

He began to travel, for long periods of time, without planning his routes and without telling anyone about the places he had visited on his return. These were the occasions that brought him into contact with international contemporary art and determined his change from figurative to informal art. He visited the North Pole, northern and eastern European countries, especially Hungary, the German Democratic Republic and Berlin. In 1977 he went to Copenhagen, Denmark, to paint murals for a playground. The following year, 1978, he went to Paris, France, for the same reason.

In 1979 he had his first personal exhibition. It was in Pavia, at the Palazzo Comunale.

During the 1960s, Mustica’s artistic repertoire, driven by a fervent youthful passion to reimagine the universe of signs, was constrained by the values and colours of his homeland: Sicily. The blue horizon line, delineating the sky from the profile of the Adrano mountains, from which Mount Etna rises, is replete with enigmatic yet seemingly uncomplicated figures. With each observation, the line that delineates the profile of this turbulent terrain offers novel combinations of visions and interpretations. This dynamic quality is particularly pronounced in the early sixties, a period characterised by profound global transformations. This period was characterised by a palpable sense of revolutionary fervour, which permeated the cultural fabric of the island. At the Istituto Statale d’Arte in Catania, Mustica encountered a generation characterised by youthful vitality and a determination to transform the world, a generation that would soon be known as the ’68ers’. During this period, the role of art in modern society was a central point of discussion among aspiring artists and young protesters. These individuals, in collaboration with their teachers, explored the theoretical and practical possibilities of expression. They also devised workshops aimed at fostering imagination and creativity. In the early 1970s, a new wave of critics of modern art arrived in Sicily. The discourse centred on the influences and convergences between Pop Art and Arte Povera, fostering a dynamic exchange of ideas. The exchange of ideas has been particularly fruitful in highlighting the differences between the United States of America and Italy. During his stays in Rome, New York and Milan, Mustica endeavours to meet contemporary artists with whom he can exchange experiences and discuss theories. The aforementioned artists, including Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tâpies, Andy Warhol, Joseph Delaney and William Johnson, are regarded as the masters of contemporary art and the radical inspiration for the new Italian artists. The latter reject the world of consumerism and goods, and propose ethics as the primacy of art. The conceptual criteria for investigating the physical world and human experience become the tools for dialogue between art and people. [i]

[i] Fortunato D’Amico, Cibo per la mente, in Fortunato D’Amico (ed.), Mustica. Sparkle, Charta, Milan, 2012, p. 11