Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection of Locarno is proud to present a great anthological retrospective of Mario Nigro, on the occasion of the painter’s first centennial, as he was born in Pistoia in 1917 and passed away in Livorno in 1992. Mario Nigro. The spaces of colour, curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Francesca Pola, was realized in collaboration with Archivio Mario Nigro, and will take place at Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection from March 18, 2018 to September 2, 2018.
Mario Nigro was among the main actors of Italian art and its civil rebirth from the aftermath of World War II: he was able to create a deeply personal abstraction, where he combined structure and colour, rigor and inventiveness. His lasting creative parable met a wide range of outcomes, resulting in a new, unexpected pictorial issue and dimensional, constituent, chromatic, spatial solutions at each new cycle, but also an absolute coherence useful to pinpoint - even in changing expression - a founding and poetic idea that would transpire in his whole artistic career. This continuity in diversity and this only objective pursued through the mutation of formal outcomes consisted for Nigro in a role of active responsibility in history: the necessity of constantly sticking to what was going on in the world around him, turning into images what he himself called in a 1969 interview «an aesthetic research as inner structure of man».
The international importance of Nigro’s work, thanks to its modern creative vision, raised a growing interest in the artistic system and its many components, from institutions to collections, particularly during this decade.
The large exhibition that had take place last fall in Fondazione Ragghianti of Lucca is both pinnacle and core of the centennial, and it will be carried on in spring-summer 2018 at the Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection in Locarno, Switzerland.
This exhibition aims at retracing the artist’s entire creative journey through his masterpieces and main turning points, here presented together with artists from the international scene.
For this occasion Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’Arte will publish a comprehensive bilingual catalogue (in English and Italian), containing original texts and historical-critical profiles of every work on display, an important instrument to further understand and spread the knowledge of Mario Nigro’s work.

mpefm SWITZERLAND art press release