Abyss Painting

Arrigo Musti born in Palermo in 1969. He attended the Faculty of Law in Palermo, where he graduated with the highest honours and became a lawyer and later a teacher of law at senior schools. However, at the age of 28, he felt that his original passion had remained latent and was determined to study, self-taught, painting techniques and human anatomy. He was soon to leave the legal profession. The “myth” is also the subject of interest of Arrigo Musti. In various forms the artist back, cyclically, to confront his own cultural classics an Mediterranean roots. Greek and Roman statues eroded by scratching also for Arrigo metaphorically represent the image of our contemporaneity. 2008 was to be the year in which Arrigo’s work was for the first time to receive international attention. After a solo exhibition at the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Morocco in Palermo, entitled “Oil and Blood Rain “, which enjoyed unexpected success with the public and media (the exhibition was also visited by the art historian Maurizio Calvesi), on the initiative of a London gallery, Arrigo participated, with some large-scale works, in an international group exhibition at the Hague. Then Christie’s auctioned some paintings by Arrigo. Later Mr. Serge Brammertz, a prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia, purchased on behalf of the United Nations two works by Arrigo to exhibit them permanently at the International Criminal Court (ICC). In October, two other large paintings in the series “oil and blood rain” were put up for auction by Hugh Edmeades, chairman of Christie’s in South Kensington, at a gallery in London. Arrigo’s works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Italy, France, Holland, England and the United States. Since 2009 Arrigo has been travelling periodically from Palermo to Rome, where he has come into contact with the art milieu in the capital. He met Larry Gagosian, thanks to the magnate Roberto Bilotti. The New Yorker gallery owner was to receive a painting by Arrigo in the series “portraits-rainmakers” from the Bilotti collection.