Nicola Rubino

Between 1964 and 1973 Rubino won 5 competitions and realized the bronze and marble bas-reliefs for the buildings of Lecce, Campobasso, EUR, Rome, Syracuse and Cuneo.

After his death in Rome, his wife and two children ordered that some of his works were donated to the municipality of Alcamo, with the obligation of allocating them in the museum inside the Castle of the Counts of Modica; as a whole, la collezione è composta, oltre a 10 tele, di 27 opere, tra gessi e bronzi,the collection is made up, apart 10 paintings, of 27 works (bronzes and plasters)[4] created between the 1950s and 1960s, and testify how Nicola Rubino always tried the naturalness of shape, of movement:[5] the "dancer”, the “Woman combing herself”, the Pharao’s bather”, the “Mother with a child” are some examples of this.

His works are characterized by an elegant and linear style; Rubino, in the realization of his sculptures, utilized different materials: plaster, bronze, marble or clay that he was able to model in an admirable way, giving shape to figures which recall the classical world and above all, the hellenic one.

As the scholar Gioacchino Aldo Ruggieri affirms, Nicola Rubino can be defined a neoclassical artist because his vision of art is a search for an accomplished beauty, like the one expressed by Canova or Foscolo.

[4] There is a tight correlation between his sculpture and his painting: according to Franco Miele, Rubino reveals the same ability in modelling a statue or using colour; he is able to express everything with a linear simplicity in both things.

Some of his works, realized between the 1950s and 1960s, are exhibited in the plaster cast gallery at the ex Collegio dei Gesuiti in Alcamo; these are the most important: Dancer, marble