Acclaimed Italian artist Nino Mustica was born in the eastern Sicilian town of Adrano. He inherited his mother’s passion for painting and music, while his father – an engineer – instilled in him a love of drawing and architecture.

Mustica went on to study at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts after his initial training at Catania’s Art Institute. In the early 1970s he spent time in London and Copenhagen, before he moved to New York in the early 1980s. In London he found himself immersed in a free culture driven by experimentation, especially in music, the art form he sees as the most spiritual and capable of influencing other types of expression.

It was music that allowed him to follow a path from the figurative to abstract. In 1986, he settled in the northern Italian metropolis of Milan. Mustica taught at the famed Academy of Fine Arts in Brera and also tutored in Budapest before returning to Milan, this time to the well-known technical university (Politecnico).

Mustica then gave up teaching to dedicate himself to painting, focussing on shaping colour. In 1994, his art took a significant step forward when he started to use 3D modelling software to further elaborate his paintings, transforming colour and its emotions on canvas into ‘shapes of colour’. This process still remains unique and truly personal. Mustica takes one of his traditionally-created paintings and re-elaborates it using a computer, producing a 3D pictorial shape. In this process, the passage from the emotion of the colour to the shape is expressed through abstract volumes. The skin that separates a space is created virtually in a weightless universe, abstract like colour and thought.

The shapes obtained can be translated into any scale, even for architecture. Mustica’s work cuts across art, as music becomes colour abstraction, then a painting, a 3D pictorial shape and finally architecture. Sicilian of origin, but international in scope, Nino Mustica has been admired and studied by painters, sculptors and architects all over the world.