Costantino Nivola

B. Orani, Italy, 1911
D. East Hampton, NY, 1988

Costantino Nivola was an Italian sculptor and muralist who grew up in Orani, a small village in Sardinia. His work fuses ancient and contemporary mediums to explore the folklore and prehistoric art of Sardinia, focusing on themes of motherhood, nature, and community.

As a young adolescent, Nivola worked locally as an apprentice stonemason and later as a stucco decorator. In 1931 he attended the State Institute for Artistic Industry (ISIA) in Monza, near Milan. His first official exhibitions are recorded in this period, and featured his xylography, a form of woodcut that remains a characteristic expression of Sardinia. In the 1930s Nivola frequented Paris, where he met his wife, Ruth Guggenheim. In 1939 as Fascism took hold in Italy, he and his wife were forced to leave for France before settling on Long Island, New York.

In New York, Nivola became a friend and disciple of the famed architect Le Corbusier. In 1950, at his garden house on Long Island, he developed his singular technique of sandcasting, a method of casting plaster or concrete sculptures from molds made in sand. Nivola began to produce murals and reliefs in collaboration with architects including Eero Saarinen, Percival Goodman, Antonin Raymond, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard G. Stein and Carl Stein, among others. These works launched Nivola into the forefront of a heated international debate over the integration of the visual arts with architecture, the so-called “synthesis of the arts”. Nivola exhibited a series of sand-cast works at Olivetti showroom in New York, Harvard University, McCormick Plaza Exposition Center in Chicago, and at Yale University.

Beginning in the sixties, in addition to his continuing commitment to public art, Nivola began to produce small-format terracotta works dedicated to intimate and private subjects before returning to marble and bronze to create a series of solemn female figures that celebrate the generative force of women and of nature. The Museo Nivola, located in his birthplace, hosts the largest collection of his works.