Nino Caruso

Nino Caruso (1928-2017) was born in Tripoli to a Sicilian family from Comiso and became one of the Italian ceramists who pushed clay from craft into sculpture and industrial design. He trained at the State Art Institute in Rome, opened a studio in Via Ruggero Fauro in 1954, and held his first solo show in 1956, introduced by Renato Guttuso.

From the mid-1960s he redesigned his own method, casting clay in polystyrene moulds and developing modular reliefs that could clad architecture: commissions for Ceramica Cava and Marazzi, the interior walls of Carlo Aymonino’s Evangelical church in Savona, the monument to the Resistance in Pesaro. He taught ceramic design at the State Art Institute in Rome for fifteen years and founded the Centro Internazionale di Ceramica.