2nd Workshop on the QCD
Structure
of the Nucleon

Life and Work of Arnaldo Pomodoro

 

Life: Arnaldo Pomodoro was born on June 23, 1926, in Morciano, Romagna, Italy. From the mid-1940s until 1957 he served as a consultant for the restoration of public buildings in Pesaro, while studying stage design and working as a goldsmith. In 1954 Pomodoro moved to Milan, where he met Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, Lucio Fontana, and other artists. His work was first exhibited that year at the Galleria Numero in Florence and at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan. In 1955 his sculpture was shown for the first time at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.

Pomodoro visited New York in 1956 and traveled in Europe in 1958. In Paris in 1959 he met Alberto Giacometti and Georges Mathieu, before returning to the United States, where he organized exhibitions of contemporary Italian art at the Bolles Gallery in New York and San Francisco. In New York the following year Pomodoro met Louise Nevelson and David Smith. He helped found the Continuità group in Italy in 1961–62. The sculptor traveled to Brazil on the occasion of his participation in the 1963 São Paulo Bienal, where he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize. A solo show of his work was included in the Venice Biennale of 1964. In 1965 he was given the first of many solo exhibitions at the Marlborough galleries in New York and Rome.

The artist taught at Stanford University in California in 1966. In 1967 Pomodoro was represented in the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal, and he received a prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. In 1968 he taught at the University of California at Berkeley; in 1970 he returned to Berkeley to attend the opening of an exhibition of his work that originated there and later traveled in the United States. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he executed commissions for outdoor sculpture in Darmstadt, New York, and Milan. In 1975 a Pomodoro retrospective was sponsored by the Municipality of Milan at the Rotonda della Besana. Pomodoro lives and works in Milan.


Work: Arnaldo Pomodoro's artistic work is pervaded by a rigorous “geometrical inspiration” so that each shape he creates tends toward essential volumes such as spheres, cylinders, cones, cubes and other perfect euclidean solids where the sharply defined lines and shapes, iterated in linear or circular formations and segments can be compared to sequences of tones in a musical composition or to the internal gears of machinery hidden within massive containers but partially visible from cracks and cuts which break the external smooth surfaces and lines. The artist's coherence in the combination of internal structures with the exterior monumentality of large sculptures spreads life into Pomodoro's artwork. The external space is denied: everything happens inside, in the “guts” hold by smooth and shiny walls, sharp volumes perfectly defined.

The analogy with the present knowledge of the structure of the nucleon is extremely appealing: a massive object defined in terms of a (supposedly) infinite number of structural iterations, yet the “external” space, while not undefined, is denied by the impossibility to find a definite boundary.

 




Last edited by F. Ronchetti, November 14, 2005