Mario Nigro (Pistoia 1917 - Livorno 1992)

Mario Nigro was born in Pistoia in 1917. Very young, he studied music. When the family moved to Livorno he began painting, leaning at first towards an interpretation of Metaphysical painting drawn from De Chirico. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Pisa and then, after the war, took a degree in pharmacy. In 1948 he became director of the Pharmacy of the Spedali Riuniti of Livorno, a position he resigned ten years later to move to Milan and devote himself solely to painting.
In 1949 he joined the Movimento d’Arte Concreta group, which brought together first in Milan and then throughout Italy the most radical, intransigent abstract artists (those inspired by the example of Mondrian, Vantongerloo, Albers and Max Bill, among others), and took the direction of geometrically and mathematically founded painting, definitively liberated of naturalistic “remembrances”. He exhibited together with his fellow group members (including Soldati, Munari, Veronesi and Dorazio) in the historic “Arte astratta e concreta” show at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1951 and later, with the same group, elsewhere in Italy and in France and Germany.
In 1964, at the urging of Fontana, he took part in the Venice Biennale, and in 1968 he had a room of his own there. Until his death in 1992, Nigro’s work was exhibited throughout Italy and in prestigious public and private galleries abroad, above all in Germany and central Europe.