Arrigo Musti
He was born in Palermo in 1969. He soon showed an interest in drawing, though this was not translated into artistic studies. After he was twenty, thanks to a chance circumstance he discovered a predisposition for the manipulation of the clays, before, and for sculpture with hard stones afterwards. Nevertheless, after a brief period devoted to sculpture, he started law studies and graduated in Palermo with the maximum mark cum laude in jurisprudence. He was actively involved in the Institute of Penal Law of the University of Palermo in meetings and theme conferences. Attention to social themes, not only regarding his own land, marked his first interests. After becoming a lawyer and then a teacher of law at senior schools, he perceived more and more that his real inclination had perhaps remained latent. At the age of 33, he decided to teach himself painting techniques and human anatomy. In nonverbal language Arrigo identified the potentialities for representing his vision of history and the contemporary world and, in the last analysis, his own states of mind and even of his own hidden fears. In the space of a few years, he did big canvases that soon were to go into prestigious public and private collections. His is figurative painting that privileges close-ups of the faces of elderly people, women and children with absent pupils “bathed” by rain that falls pitilessly on the “last people” on earth. In 2007 the town of Bagheria appointed him as an adviser on the arts, multimedia works and territorial artistic promotion. He worked out reflections on the contemporary art that, in a way at once high-sounding and provocative, he defined as “impop art.” His canvases also aroused the curiosity of the great Bagheria director Giuseppe Tornatore. In 2007 the latter wrote an encouraging comment on Arrigo’s works. He also did a video installation called “XX a century of passion” and was a member of numerous art juries. In 2007 Kalòs published “impop art.” Thanks to the Charles Saatchi Gallery in London online in 2008 he was contacted by an organization that handles art events in London to participate in an international collective exhibition, because of the quality of the artists involved, at the Hague. Christie’s auction house also auctioned Arrigo’s pictures. On 22 June Mr. Serge Brammertz, first prosecutor at the ICC, the International Criminal Court of the Hague for ex-Yugoslavia, on behalf of the United Nations purchased two big canvases by Arrigo in the series Oil and Blood Rain to exhibit them permanently at the International Court, believing that they denounce the horrors of people tortured in ex-Yugoslavia. Arrigo donated all the profits to the Red Cross in the United Kingdom. Afterwards the United Nations sent to the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL) a third canvas by Arrigo, a big one, in the “blood rain” series. It will be displayed in the Museum of the Memory of the Civil War being set up in Freetown (Sierra Leone). Confirming that 2008 marked major interest in Arrigo’s painting, in October two more big canvases in the “oil and blood rain” were auctioned by Hugh Edmeades, chairman of Christie’s South Kensington, at the Framers Gallery in London. Then the managing and academic committee of the Guttuso Museum acquired Dirty Rain I for the permanent collection. A canvas of his is already part of the prestigious C. Bilotti collection. In 2009 the young film director Peter de Luca made the movie “Half lives” inspired by Arrigo’s works. In just 6 years Arrigo’s works have been exhibited in personal and collective exhibitions in Italy, France, Holland, England and the United States. In 2009 Arrigo – on whom Gregorio Napoli, Eugeny Solonovic, Giuseppe Tornatore and art historians like Dora Gilda Favatella Lo Cascio had already written – was the subject of prestigious critiques by Maurizio Calvesi and Augusta Monferini for the catalog “Rain.” Articles on Arrigo’s artistic production have been published in magazines and dailies with national, foreign and international distribution and, in the latter case, translated into 10 languages. Arrigo’s study-studio is in Bagheria (near Palermo).


Permanent exhibitions:
Hague (Holland), criminal court for war crimes ICC (United Nations);
Freeetown (Sierra Leone) Special Court of Sierra Leone; (United Nations)
Chicago (Illinois) city hall;
Burundi town hall (Hopital de Marguerite Barankitse);
Palermo, Museum at Palazzo Comitini (Palermo Regional Province);
Bagheria (Palermo), Guttuso Museum;
Consulate General of the Kingdom of Morocco Palermo, Palace of Justice, (B. Bruno meeting room)
Rome, C. Bilotti Collection

translated by Prof. Denis Gailor