Happy Birthday to the sculptor, jeweler, and stage designer Arnaldo Pomodoro! The artist was born on June 23, 1926, in Morciano, Emilia Romagna, Italy.
Pomodoro began his career as a jeweler and stage designer, working for his brother Giò Pomodoro, also now a sculptor. In the mid-1950s, Arnaldo Pomodoro moved to Milan and began making his first artworks: low reliefs characterized by a rough surface quality with detailed vegetable forms. In the northern industrial capital, Pomodoro met Lucio Fontana andEnrico Baj. In 1960 Pomodoro met David Smith and Louise Nevelson during his first trip to the USA. Preoccupied with the advance of technology, Pomodoro began making large-scale bronze sculptures. He explored the notion of “negative spatiality,” whereby the void became a sculptural form, in his main motifs of the free-standing column, disc–rotor, sphere and cube. In 1963 he executed the first of his Sphere series, which became a recurrent metaphor for the changing status of the world. The Rotors, created between 1966 and 1968, were spherical formations with distinct perforations, as though achieved by a machine.
Beginning in the 1970s Pomodoro received numerous commissions for large-scale projects, such as the plan for tombs cut into a hill at a cemetery in Urbino (1978–81) and the Three Columns (1979) for the world headquarters of the Pepsi Cola company in Purchase, NY.
IMAGES:
Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, 1975
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Sphere No. 4 ( Sfera no. 4 ),1963, Bronze and patina, Guggenheim Collection
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Rotante massimo, IV, 1969-1970, Bronze, Fondazione Pomodoro
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Cippo, I, 1983-1984, Patinated bronze, Fondazione Pomodoro
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Il Disco, temporay installation in Piazza Meda in Lanza
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Sphere within a Sphere, 1996, United Nations, New York City