Sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro passed away on the eve of his 99th birthday. He passed away last night but the news was given at 8 a.m. this morning by the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Born June 23, 1926, in Morciano di Romagna, he was considered one of Italy’s greatest contemporary sculptors. Elder brother of the equally well-known sculptor Giorgio “Giò” Pomodoro, Arnaldo transformed sculpture into a form of intellectual and visual investigation: large perfect solids in bronze - spheres, cubes, columns, discs - marked inside by incisions, cracks and cuts that reveal internal mechanisms and complex structures.
After earning a diploma as a surveyor, Pomodoro embarked on a technical profession, however, soon devoting his passions to sculpture . In the early 1950s, fascinated by matter, he experimented with heterogeneous materials: gold and silver in jewelry, then iron, wood, concrete and, finally, bronze, which would become his favorite medium for small-scale works and monumental sculptures. He moved to Milan in 1954 and still lives and works near the Darsena di Porta Ticinese in the heart of the city. In 1961-1962 he joined the informal group “Continuità,” founded together with Lucio Fontana and others, where he consolidated an informal stylistic signature that soon evolved, however, toward more rigid formal types, while retaining the tension between polished surfaces and complex internal structures. This doubly aesthetic and technical drive becomes the hallmark of the works that will make him internationally famous.
The first major turning point occurred in Spoleto, in 1962, when Pomodoro made The Traveler’s Column, beginning the investigation for which he is universally known. Highly representative of this path are his “spheres that break”: monumental bronze structures that, seemingly perfect and polished, conceal incisions that rip through their surface, revealing complex solids and surprising sculptural mechanisms. The sculptural work becomes a dialogue between order and chaos, the obvious and the hidden.
His language, characterized by a rigorous “geometric spirit,” employs simple, perfect forms - sphere, cube, cylinder, cone, parallelepiped - repeated or segmented as in a musical composition or gear mechanism. The aesthetic effect is dynamic: conspicuous smooth surfaces open up to interior landscapes, drawing the viewer into a visual and emotional exploration.
Pomodoro has exhibited in some of the world’s most prestigious art spaces-Milan (Rotonda della Besana, 1974), Paris (Musée d’Art Moderne, 1976), Florence (Forte Belvedere, 1984), Ferrara (Palazzo dei Diamanti, 1987), Hakone in Japan (1994), New York (Marlborough Gallery, 1996) and many others. His works are distributed in public spaces in cities such as Lampedusa, Sorrento, Rimini, Pesaro, Genoa, Rome, Pavia, Terni, Turin, Tivoli, Belluno, San Giovanni Rotondo (in Renzo Piano’s Basilica di Padre Pio complex), as well as Copenhagen, Brisbane, Dublin, Los Angeles, and on the UN campus. Pomodoro has also taught in art departments of American universities - Stanford, Berkeley, Mills College - contributing to the training of new generations of artists. Recognized with numerous awards, Pomodoro was awarded the Imperial Præmium for sculpture by the Japan Art Association in 1990, the same year Federico Fellini received the award for film and theater.
The distinctive feature of his works, the gash that gives a glimpse of the interior of a perfect geometry, testifies to Pomodoro’s sculptural vision: the exterior becomes a container of complexity, tension and mystery. His forms do not seek simple beauty, but rather interrogate the dual relationship between surface and structure, between apparent order and underlying disorder.
“With the passing of Arnaldo Pomodoro,” the Foundation writes, “the art world loses one of its most authoritative, lucid and visionary voices. The Maestro leaves an immense legacy, not only for the strength of his work, which is internationally recognized, but also for the coherence and intensity of his thought, capable of looking to the future with tireless creative energy.” The Foundation “will continue to operate according to the will of the founder, guaranteeing the preservation and enhancement of his work, committing itself to spreading its material and immaterial heritage through the realization of exhibitions, events and initiatives in an inventive, almost experimental space of study and confrontation on the themes of art and sculpture, which aims at an involvement, deep and global, with people and society.”
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| Farewell to Arnaldo Pomodoro, sculptor passes away on the eve of 99th birthday |
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