Arnaldo Pomodoro

Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro in 1926, spent his childhood in Pesaro. He moved to Milan in 1954, where he made the acquaintance of intellectuals such as Alfonso Gatto, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano, and of artists such as Lucio Fontana, Giò Ponti, Munari, Mulas, Baj and many others.

His first jewels were exhibited at Milan’s Triennale, and he developed reliefs which exhibit a singular form of “writing” that had never before been seen in sculpture, and which soon was to attract the attention of Italy’s most prominent art critics. In the early 1960s he began to address the problem of three-dimensionality and focused his research on the forms of solid geometry, corroding their surfaces and opening lesions that destroy their perfection and reveal their secret interiors. In 1966, he was commissioned to create a sphere of a diameter of three and a half meters for the Montreal Expo. Now sited in Rome in the square before the Farnesina Palace, this work was the first of his sculptures on a monumental scale, and thus marks the inception of a numerous body of works in public spaces of particular significance and symbolic importance: the squares of many of the world’s great cities—Milan, Copenhagen, Brisbane, Los Angeles, Darmstadt, and others; the PepsiCo Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, New York; the entrance to Dublin’s Trinity College; the grounds of Mills College in California; the Courtyard of the Pine Cone at the Vatican Museums; the space in front of the United Nations Building in New York; the approach to UNESCO’s Paris headquarters.

In 2000 he created the new “Sala d’armi” (the Armory) at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan; in 2002 an enormous “radiant crown” (above a crucifix by Giuseppe Maraniello) for the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; in 2003 the Cross and the altar for the New Liturgical Hall of Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, designed by Renzo Piano. In 2004, his sculpture Novecento (twenty-one meters tall and seven meters wide at its base) was sited in Piazzale Pier Luigi Nervi in Rome. It was commissioned by the City of Rome to celebrate the passage from the old to the new millennium in the year of the Jubilee.
Memorable retrospectives in Italy and abroad have consolidated his reputation as one of the most significant contemporary artists.

He has taught in the art departments of various American universities: Stanford, Berkeley and Mills College. In collaboration with the Council of Pietrarubbia in Montefeltro he has founded and directed TAM (Artistic Treatment of Metals), a school for the training of young artists. He has been elected Academician of the National Academy of San Luca of Rome in 1989 and of the Milan Brera Academy in 1993.
Arnaldo Pomodoro has also been active in stage design, thus returning to one of the passions of his youth: he has created any number of “spectacle machines” for productions that range from Greek tragedy to opera, from contemporary theater to music. In 1972, he designed the sets for Luca Ronconi’s production of a text by Kleist on a floating stage in Lake Zurich; in the 1980s he created the sets for the various Greek tragedies presented on the earthquake ruins of the Sicilian city of Gibellina; in 2001 he created the visual setting for the concert in homage to Igor Stravinsky, performed at Rome’s Teatro Olimpico and in 2004 the stage set for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at Torre del Lago.

2005 saw his participation in Ermanno Olmi’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Leipzig Opera House, with Riccardo Chailly conducting; in 2007, he created the sets for Fabio Vacchi’s opera Teneke, (based on Yashar Kemal’s novel of the same title), directed by Ermanno Olmi, and with Roberto Abbado conducting, at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala.
He has been the recipient of many prestigious prizes; in San Paolo in 1963; in Venice in 1964; one of the six international prizes (beside Albers, Bacon, Miró, Paolozzi and Vasarely) awarded in 1967 by the Carnegie Institute; in Tokyo in 1990 the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture together with Leonard Bernstein for music, Federico Fellini for cinema and theatre, James Stirling for architecture and Antoni Tàpies for painting. He is awarded the UBU Theatre Prize for his stage sets for Ahmad Shawqi’s The Passion of Cleopatra and Jean Genet’s The Screens in 1990 and for Bernard Marie Koltès’ In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields in 1992.
In 1992, he received a degree in the humanities honoris causa from Trinity College Dublin, and in 2001 an honorary degree in architectural engineering from the University of Ancona. In 1996, he was elected a Knight of the “Gran Croce dell’Ordine” for his service to the Italian Republic, and received the “Medaglia d’oro” of Italy’s Ministry of Culture in 2005. The Association Friends of Spoleto awarded him with the prize Lex Spoletina 2006. In April 2008, he received the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from San Francisco’s International Sculpture and the ‘Man of the Year 2008’ award from Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

In 1995 he set up the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro with the aim to promote and organize cultural and artistic events. In 2005 the Fondazione started its activity in the new Milan exhibition space, renovated by Pierluigi Cerri, thus becoming an important participant in the cultural life of Milan.