Arnaldo Pomodoro (Italian, born 1926)
In 1963, the year he produced Piccolo Sfera, the self taught Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro won a major prize at the Sao Paolo Biennial for his highly polished cast bronze spheres whose surfaces he gouges out and scars. The Brazilian award was followed by a top prize at the Venice Biennale a year later, which secured his reputation as an important new talent.
Pomodoro, whose name means “golden apple,” or more colloquially, “tomato” in Italian, began his career making jewelry after rigorous training as an architect. He slowly moved into the realm of sculpture, bringing with him a feeling for exquisite detail and craftsmanship, geometry, texture, and the palpable tension present in man’s relationship to the technological age. He worked first in more malleable lead and pewter to initiate the idea of his expressionist “boxes.” He subsequently moved into the more demanding processes of cast brass and bronze.
For the artist, who lives and works in Milan, the starting point is always solid geometry; the expression of tension begins as he scores, gouges out, and selectively cuts into his spheres, cylinders, cubes and disks. “The contrast between the polished and torn surfaces is precisely the difficulty of the individual to adapt to the new world,” he feels. What he finds within these solid geometries evokes a strange and curious crystalline imagery drawn from the machine. As a writer for Time noted on December 3, 1965: “His slabs look like the innards of computers, his spheres like ball-shaped printing heads for IBM typewriters. He did a facade for a Cologne school that is 78 feet high by 27 feet wide and entitled Grand Homage to Technological Civilization. He calls other slabs Radars because they strike him as “capturing feelings.”
Rather than being at odds with the machine, Pomodoro searches for harmony between technological society and man. His sculpture probes for a tactile solution that will satisfy both the intellect and the emotions. The complicated crevices and fissures in Piccolo Sfera interrupt the polished surface to produce visual and tactile counterpoints. The effect seems to suggest the chasm between machine-age perfection and man’s inner doubts.
Arnaldo Pomodoro is a recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sculpture Center.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries May 2008.