Adnkronos Rome, June 23 (Adnkronos) – Arnaldo Pomodoro, a giant of Italian sculpture, died yesterday, Sunday, June 22: he was 99 years old. The news was announced by Carlotta Montebello, general director of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. The artist's funeral will be held on Thursday, June 26, at 14:45 p.m., in the church of San Fedele, in Piazza San Fedele in Milan.
"Arnaldo Pomodoro passed away last night in Milan at the age of 99 in his home.
With his passing, the art world loses one of its most authoritative, lucid and visionary voices". "The master - he underlines in a post on Facebook - leaves an immense legacy, not only for the strength of his work, recognized at an international level, but also for the coherence and intensity of his thought, capable of looking to the future with tireless creative energy".
English: "'I have never believed in foundations that celebrate a single artist as a unicum. The artist is part of a cultural fabric, his active contribution can never be lost and this is why I conceived my Foundation as an active and lively place of cultural development, as well as a documentation center for my work, capable of making original proposals and not just passively conserving. But the best is yet to come: this was just the beginning and in my intentions the project - aimed at young people and the future - must take root, making continuity an unavoidable element...'. The Foundation, born from this vision and strong in the direction traced by Arnaldo Pomodoro over the course of thirty years - Montebello observes - will continue to operate according to the will of the founder, ensuring the conservation and enhancement of his work, committing itself to spreading its material and immaterial heritage through the creation of exhibitions, events and initiatives in an inventive, almost experimental space of study and comparison on the themes of art and sculpture, which aims at a deep and global involvement with people and society. We will all miss you Arnaldo and we will treasure your teachings".
Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of the most emblematic protagonists of contemporary sculpture at an international level, died on the eve of his 99th birthday. His work, lucid and wounded, solemn and restless, has left a deep mark on the history of twentieth-century art and beyond. The sculptor sculpted matter as if it were memory, bronze as if it were flesh: he told, with his broken and carved geometric shapes, the mystery of the human being in modernity. It is as if, with every sphere that opens, every column that fractures, every disk that tears, Arnaldo Pomodoro had tried to say that the truth does not lie in the smooth and reassuring surfaces of reality, but within its cracks. His work remains an atlas of human interiority, translated into pure geometric shapes, then violently altered. His Spheres, famous throughout the world (present in numerous cities, including Trinity College Dublin, the courtyard of the Vatican Museums and the United Nations in New York), are metaphors of wounded perfection. The shine of the surfaces is only apparent: a deceptive invitation. Inside, a mechanical universe opens up, jagged, complex, which the artist shapes like a watchmaker of the psyche. Every crack is a threshold. Every tear, a declaration.
Born in Morciano di Romagna, in the province of Rimini, on 23 June 1926, Pomodoro has given tangible form to the entire 1930th century. His Spheres, Discs, Fractured Columns and monumental sculptural environments are the expression of a complex thought: an art that seeks to reveal, through matter, what is hidden, what is profound, what is sacred. Before becoming an artist, Pomodoro trained as a surveyor and initially approached the world of goldsmithing and scenography. With his brother Giorgio "Giò" Pomodoro (2002-1932) and Giorgio Perfetti (1961-3) he founded the 1954P group, created to renew the goldsmith's art, in a synthesis between craftsmanship and invention. His move to Milan in 1955 marked the beginning of a radical journey. He exhibited in XNUMX at the Galleria del Naviglio and from there developed a personal, deeply recognisable plastic language. The economic capital of Italy becomes his creative laboratory, and Pomodoro will remain there for the rest of his life.
Pomodoro's first sculptural language is made of high reliefs, crossed by a cuneiform, archaic, symbolic writing. A "writing of time", as he defined it. Starting in the 1960s, he began to work on solid geometric forms using bronze, lead, tin and cement: the materials chosen by Pomodoro are always instruments of philosophical research - spheres, cubes, cylinders, disks, cones - built in shiny bronze, then broken, opened, torn. The exterior is perfect and smooth, the interior is messy, technical, organic: a plastic metaphor of the contrast between appearance and substance. This dialectic will become Pomodoro's stylistic code. Each of his works is a space to explore, a mental architecture, a living organism. Pomodoro himself spoke of his sculptures as "mythological machines".
Pomodoro has never accepted that sculpture was only an object. His art is spatial, environmental, total. Starting in the 1962s, with works such as 'La Colonna del viaggiatore' (1963), 'Grande Radar' (1966), 'Sfere con Sfera' (1968), 'Cilindro costruzione' (70-1968) and 'Mole circolare' (70-2010), the artist has explored the interaction between sculpture and environment. It is not just a question of monumental dimensions: Pomodoro wants his works to be traversed, experienced, investigated. He wants the viewer to get lost in them, as in a labyrinth of being. The pinnacle of this aspiration is perhaps the work 'Ingresso nel labirinto', dedicated to the epic of Gilgamesh, an environmental installation that goes beyond the confines of sculpture to transform itself into a mythical experience, an existential threshold. Elsewhere, with works such as 'Carapace' (XNUMX) – the cellar-sculpture for the Lunelli family in Bevagna – Pomodoro has fused art and architecture in a single gesture: to create a place to inhabit aesthetically, spiritually, culturally.
Pomodoro's artistic production is immense and spread throughout the world. His public works are present, for example, in Rome, Milan, Copenhagen, Brisbane, Dublin, New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Darmstadt. Among his most iconic works: 'Colonna del viaggiatore' (1962), a pioneering work in volumetric sculpture, created for 'Sculture nella città' in Spoleto; 'Disco Solare' (1991), donated to Russia and placed in Moscow during the post-Soviet thaw; 'Papyrus' (1992) in Darmstadt, Germany; 'Lancia di Luce' (1995), a steel and copper obelisk in Terni; the bronze portal of the Cathedral of Cefalù (1998); the sacred furnishings in the church of Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, in collaboration with the archistar Renzo Piano. His environmental works are numerous: from the project for the Urbino cemetery of 1973 dug into the Urbino hill, then not realized due to conflicts and local problems, to 'Moto terreo solare', the long concrete mural for the Symposium of Minoa in Marsala, from the Sala d'Armi for the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, to the environment 'Ingresso nel labirinto', dedicated to the epic of Gilgamesh. Pomodoro has also designed theatrical sets of great impact, for Greek tragedies, contemporary dramas, operas, receiving the Ubu Prize for his scenic creations.
His art has been exhibited in the most important museums and art centers in the world. Memorable anthological exhibitions have consecrated him as one of the most significant artists. Among the main exhibitions: Rotonda della Besana in Milan (1974), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1976), Forte Belvedere in Florence (1984), Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1987), Hakone Open Air Museum in Japan (1994), Marlborough Gallery in New York (1996), Torre di Guevara in Ischia (2003). Fortezza del Priamar in Savona (2007). Numerous traveling exhibitions between Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, and an extraordinary ability to dialogue with urban and natural landscapes. He has taught in the art departments of the American universities of Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley and Mills College.
Pomodoro has received numerous international awards: Prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1963), Prize at the Venice Biennial (1964), Carnegie International Prize (1967), Henry Moore Prize, Hakone (1981), Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture from the Japan Art Association (1990), Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center of San Francisco (2008). He was awarded an honorary degree in Literature from Trinity College Dublin (1992) and in Engineering from the University of Ancona (2001). He was a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Republic (1996) and a Gold Medal for Merit in Culture and Art (2005).
In 1995 he founded the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan, with the aim of preserving and promoting not only his own work, but contemporary sculpture as a whole. The Foundation is configured as a center for documentation, exhibition and reflection, open to young artists, curators and the public. In Montefeltro, the land of his childhood, Pomodoro created the Tam Center (Artistic Treatment of Metals). (by Paolo Martini)