Mario Nigro was born in Pistoia on June 28, 1917, the youngest of four children; his father was a teacher of mathematics, his mother the daughter of one of Garibaldi’s officers. It is in these origins that two aspects characteristic of his work are present: his interest in science and his passion for politics. And we might add a third to these two: his fascination with music - he started playing the violin and piano when he was only five years old. In 1929, Nigro’s family moved to Livorno where, in 1933, aged sixteen, he began to paint as an autodidact in the local post-Macchiaioli tradition. Echoes of the style of the Novecento Italiano group were investigated and intensified, while he developed his quest for Expressionist and Metaphysical motifs. Meanwhile, his education took a decidedly scientific turn: in 1941 he graduated in Chemistry from Pisa University, where he was an assistant in the Institute of Mineralogy until 1944; in 1947 he took his second degree, in Pharmacy, and in the following year he was appointed as Pharmacist at Spedali Riuniti in Livorno. Although his artistic horizons were limited because of the local art milieu’s attachment to tradition, life in Livorno during the war provided Nigro with a basis of civil and social ideals thanks to the political climate prevailing in the city, leading him to regard painting as the expression of feelings of rebellion and freedom. The group to which Nigro belonged, G.A.M. Gruppo artistico moderno, was, in fact, considered to be openly polemical with regard to the local artistic circles and eager for new opportunities. In 1946 and 1947 he instinctively - as he maintained on various occasions - transformed his painting into a non-objective style; naturally induced by the neo-Cubist movement that was active at the time and the climate of cultural rebirth characteristic of the period, he soon developed an original and dynamic version of abstraction nourished by his scientific and musical background. When, in 1948, he visited the first Venice Biennale to be held after the war, he was able to discover that his themes and interests were in harmony with the new developments in abstract art. In 1949 his son Gianni was born. In December of the same year he had his first solo exhibition at the Libreria Salto in Milan, where he met Lucio Fontana and the Milanese movement known as M.A.C. Movimento Arte Concreta. However, his activity in this period was only partly associated with Concrete Art, whether Italian or international: Nigro, in fact, pursued a strongly individual line linked to the dynamic Futurist matrix of simultaneity and optical iterations on a programmed basis. With the cycle of the “Ritmi continui simultanei” [“Continuous Simultaneous Rhythms”] and that of the “Pannelli a scacchi” [“Chequered Panels”], the artist was aware that he had progressed beyond the canons of Concrete Art and a classical and confused interpretation of the Suprematist and Neo-Plastic experimentation. Nigro’s works of this period immediately met with international acclaim, which is attested by the invitations he received to exhibit at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in 1951 and 1952. He was not always so successful in Italy, where he was invited to participate in the most important exhibitions of the M.A.C. Movimento Arte Concreta, such as Arte astratta e concreta in Italia held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1951, but he was not accepted by such major shows as the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale. His work in Italy did not escape the attention of perceptive observers like the critic Gillo Dorfles, who, in February 1951, wrote the catalogue essay for Nigro’s solo exhibition at the Libreria Salto and, in January 1952, included one of his works in an article in the Paris periodical Art d’aujourd’hui . In 1952 Nigro joined an association in Rome known as the Art Club, participating in its exhibitions for a number of years; as a corresponding member for Tuscany, he opened a branch at the Casa della Cultura in Livorno, organizing exhibitions of artists linked to the group, such as those based in Paris at the Galerie Arnaud in that city in 1953, or writing the catalogue essay himself for the show of artists working in Rome in 1955. Also in 1952, there was the first hint of the development of his inquiry towards environment art: in January, in Milan, in the Saletta dell’Elicottero, he exhibited a model for the environmental realization, using plastic material, of images in space and, in March, in Livorno, at the Casa della Cultura, he designed, for Nikolai Evreinov’s play Theatrical Soul, the stage set with abstract rhythmic elements of an environmental character. Dating from the end of 1952, with an investigation that was to develop over the following decade, are the first works in the “Spazio totale” [“Total Space”] cycle, which Nigro carefully systematized from the theoretical point of view with a series of writings published in 1954 and 1955. In this period his relations with the art milieu in Florence are intensified through his participation in the activities of Fiamma Vigo’s Galleria Numero. In addition, his contacts with the Milan art circles continued: in May 1955 he took part in an exhibition at the Galleria del Fiore, devoted to the synthesis of the arts that led to the founding of the MAC/Espace group, the fusion between M.A.C. Movimento Arte Concreta and the French Groupe Espace. In 1956 a dramatic tension with a strongly expressive basis developed in Nigro’s work; this was, at least in part, linked to contemporary political events such as the uprising in Hungary, and generated the “Tensioni reticolari” [“Reticular Tensions”] series and, at the end of the decade, prompted him to adopt a style close to that of Art Informel. In 1957 Michel Seuphor invited Nigro to participate in a large exhibition entitled 50 ans d’Art Abstrait at the Galerie Creuze in Paris, and his name appeared in the large volume on this theme. In 1958 he resigned from his post as a pharmacist and, having abandoned his last battles in Livorno in defence of modern art, he moved to Milan to devote himself to painting. In fact, in 1959, he had three solo exhibitions: at the Galerie Kasper in Lausanne, at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, and at the Galleria Annunciata in Milan. A year later the severe injuries he received in a car crash prevented him from painting for some time. Between 1965 and 1975 - after having reconsidered the “Spazio totale” cycle and the series of “Collages vibratili” [“Vibratory Collages”] in the early 1960s - Nigro started to create environmental works, which he also exhibited at the 1968 Venice Biennale, where a room was devoted to him in the Italian pavilion. Although he had only started to participate in the Biennale in 1964, thanks to the good offices of Lucio Fontana, Nigro adhered to the protests that characterized this much contested edition of the show and covered up his works just a few hours before the opening. In the second half of the 1960s Nigro started the minimal progressive perspective projections of a new cycle, called “Tempo totale” [“Total Time”], then “Strutture fisse con licenza cromatica [Fixed Structures with Chromatic Licence]”, as usual accompanying the production of the works with an exhaustive theoretical reflection, as demonstrated by the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Galleria RizzatoWithworth in Milan and the critical work carried out with Carla Lonzi and Paolo Fossati, which bore fruit in the first monograph on the artist published by Scheiwiller in Milan in 1968. From the mid-1970s onwards, Nigro began his investigation of what he described as the “Dalla metafisica del colore. I concetti strutturali elementari geometrici [Elementary Geometric Concepts of the Metaphysics of Color]”, which he presented at the 1978 Venice Biennale with Ettore e Andromaca [Hector and Andromache], a work comprising ten elements. The following year, on the occasion of his large solo exhibition at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan, he executed, on the walls of the gallery, a series of graffiti linked to the positional analysis of the golden section. Thus began his “Analisi della linea” [“Analysis of the Line”], which, in 1980, assumed the dramatic form of the “Terremoto” [“Earthquake”] and, in 1982, the artist presented at the Venice Biennale his work Emarginazione [Marginalization]. The following year, the interrupted line was sensitized through its transformation into a series of dots, giving rise to the subsequent cycles of the “Orizzonte” [“Horizon”] and the “Orme” [“Tracks”]. In 1984 the municipality of Pistoia devoted a large retrospective exhibition to the artist. In the second half of the decade, in the series of “Ritratti” [“Portraits”] and “Dipinti satanici” [“Satanic Paintings”], an increasingly ardent expressiveness was evident in his works; this was constantly related to a scientific vision that was anything but narrative or descriptive, but was rendered explicit in a more rarefied direction in the cycles of the early 1990s, the “Meditazioni” [“Meditations”] and the “Strutture” [“Structures”]. Mario Nigro died in Livorno on August 11, 1992.