Latest news with #ArnaldoPomodoro
CNN
4 hours ago
- General
- CNN
Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose bronze spheres decorate prominent public spaces around the world, dies at 98
Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Pomodoro's massive spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed out interiors that Pomodoro has said referred to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors. In a note of condolences, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro's 'wounded' spheres 'speak to us today of the fragility and complexity of the human and the world.' The Vatican's sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. 'In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,' the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere. The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter (10 foot, eight inch) diameter 'Sphere Within Sphere' sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The UN sphere refers to the coming of the new millennium, the UN said: 'a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,' and 'a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world,' Pomodoro said of it. Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project. Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926. In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines. He had multiple retrospectives and taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Mills College, according to his biography on the foundation website.
CNN
6 hours ago
- General
- CNN
Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose bronze spheres decorate prominent public spaces around the world, dies at 98
Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Pomodoro's massive spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed out interiors that Pomodoro has said referred to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors. In a note of condolences, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro's 'wounded' spheres 'speak to us today of the fragility and complexity of the human and the world.' The Vatican's sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. 'In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,' the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere. The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter (10 foot, eight inch) diameter 'Sphere Within Sphere' sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The UN sphere refers to the coming of the new millennium, the UN said: 'a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,' and 'a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world,' Pomodoro said of it. Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project. Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926. In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines. He had multiple retrospectives and taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Mills College, according to his biography on the foundation website.
Straits Times
8 hours ago
- General
- Straits Times
Arnaldo Pomodoro, sculptor of monumental fractured spheres, dies at 98
ROME - Arnaldo Pomodoro, a postwar Italian artist whose monumental spheres – highly polished but jarringly fractured – populate public squares around the world, died on June 22 at his home in Milan. He was 98. His death, coming the day before his 99th birthday, was announced by his niece Carlotta Montebello, who is director-general of Pomodoro's foundation in Milan. A self-taught artist who trained as an engineer and goldsmith, Pomodoro was best known for his imposing bronze spherical sculptures, which stand outside the United Nations headquarters in New York; inside Vatican City; on the campus of Trinity College Dublin; at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; and at many other locations. His other major public works include Entrance to the Labyrinth, an enormous maze adorned with cuneiform sculptural formations in Milan; a controversial fiberglass crucifix that hangs in the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Milwaukee; and Disco, a giant bronze disk, also in Milan, where he spent much of his life. 'Pomodoro was one of a number of important European artists to emerge from the aftermath of World War II whose work dealt with the effects of a world destabilised by nuclear arms, economic hardships and the trauma of the Holocaust,' Dr Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, said in an email in 2021. Pomodoro's spheres, he added, 'were widely admired at the time for their resonance with other postwar expressionist movements'. Pomodoro's spheres began to gain worldwide attention in the 1960s. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1963 and the National Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale the subsequent year. The Marlborough Gallery hosted two major solo exhibitions at its venues in Rome and New York in 1965, and he was featured in Time magazine. The Museum of Modern Art was one of the first museums to recognise the significance of his work. In 1964, MoMA acquired Sphere 1, a year after it was made. Pomodoro won the International Prize for Sculpture from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1967, and he was invited to teach at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, institutions where he maintained a teaching relationship throughout the years. By the early 1970s, American art critic Sam Hunter wrote that Pomodoro had become, 'in the world's eyes, Italy's leading artistic figure', producing sculptures that were both 'marketable as well as being serious aesthetic objects'. 'His most persistent metaphor has been to cut away the facade, or skin of things, to get at the vulnerable and fragile inner core,' Mr Hunter added. Arnaldo Armando Pomodoro was born on June 23, 1926, in Morciano di Romagna, a small town near Rimini, on Italy's eastern coast. He was the eldest of three children of Antonio and Beatrice (Luzzi) Pomodoro. His mother was a talented dressmaker, and his father was a sometime poet. When Arnaldo was just a few months old, the family moved to nearby Orciano di Pesaro, in the Marche region, where his brother, Gio, was born in 1930, and his sister, Teresa, in 1941. After high school, Pomodoro earned a diploma as a surveyor, graduating at the end of World War II, when there was a great demand for engineers. His first job was as a consultant in the Pesaro civil engineering department, advising on the reconstruction of buildings damaged in the war. At the same time, he developed his artistic side, attending the local Mengaroni Art Institute, where he focused on stage design. He also worked as a goldsmith. In 1953, at age 27, Pomodoro travelled to Milan to see a Pablo Picasso exhibition at the Royal Palace. Picasso's monumental canvas Guernica, which depicts the horrors of war, was on display in the palace's Sala delle Cariatidi, which had yet to be restored after it was bombed in 1943. Profoundly moved by the experience, Pomodoro decided to move to Milan, where he encountered some of the emerging masters of the postwar Italian art scene, including Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo and Lucio Fontana. These artists were pushing the boundaries of art into more expressionistic realms, and he followed their lead. He began creating high-relief works and exhibiting them; by 1956, he had work in the Venice Biennale. Pomodoro became increasingly curious about American abstract expressionists, whose work he had seen at art collector Peggy Guggenheim's home in Venice and at the Paris Biennale. He applied for and received a study grant from the Italian Foreign Ministry, and in 1959, he traveled to California and New York to exhibit the work of Italian contemporary artists and to meet American artists. It proved to be a life-altering trip. In California, he met Mark Rothko; and in New York, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He got to know sculptors Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Mark di Suvero, who were creating outsize outdoor artworks using heavy materials, such as castoff wood scraps and steel beams. He also visited the Museum of Modern Art, where he saw for the first time sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist artist. Later, in an interview with Italian art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Pomodoro said, 'I was born as a sculptor in the Brancusi room at MoMA.' Working from sleek, polished forms like Brancusi's, he sliced through them – just as Lucio Fontana had slashed through canvases – to reveal a complex inner core. At first, these interiors appear chaotic, but they suggest some kind of indecipherable organisational system, like the innards of a machine. Most of Pomodoro's work continued in this vein: He started with a glossy geometric form, such as a column, block or disk, then cut away at its perfection, adding erosions, tears and fissures. He explained that when faced by the 'perfect purity of Brancusi's works', he began to consider the 'outdatedness of that perfection'. 'This was the early '60s,' he said in an interview for his 90th birthday with Italian journalist Ada Masoera. 'We were living in tense and changing times, seeking out new values.' He felt the impulse, he said, to 'dig into the geometric shapes to discover the internal ferment, the mystery that had been enclosed, the vitality within'. Pomodoro's works have been collected by many museums around the world. In the United States, they include the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. He established the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan in 1995, originally intending it to document and archive his work. Four years later, he added an exhibition space, which briefly presented art by other 20th century artists. It closed in 2012. The foundation continued to operate out of his home and studio in Milan, where he established project rooms, where young artists were given space to work and exhibit. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. His brother, Gio Pomodoro, also became a sculptor; he died in 2002. Gio's son, Bruto Pomodoro, is also an artist. Arnaldo Pomodoro's artistic vision allowed for the world to have both its clean, glossy exterior and a complicated interior. As art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, a longtime friend of his, put it, 'Pomodoro's vision has always been cosmic, aimed at wholeness'. Mr Hunter wrote in 1972 that Pomodoro's work remained 'a powerful metaphor of violence and revelation in art, and keeps the dialectic between inward and outer man ongoing and open-ended, and always surprising.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Renowned Italian sphere sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro dies aged 98
Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary artists, has died at the age of 98. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Best known for his massive and shiny bronze spheres with clawed out interiors which decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, the artist sought to comment on the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors. In a note of condolences, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro's 'wounded' spheres 'speak to us today of the fragility and complexity of the human and the world.' The Vatican's sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna Courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. 'In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,' the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere. The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter diameter 'Sphere Within Sphere' sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. Pomodoro described it as 'a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,' and 'a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world.' Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project. In addition to his spheres, Pomodoro designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines, as well as a controversial fiberglass crucifix for the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - featuring a four-and-a-half-meter diameter crown of thorns which hovers over the figure of Christ. The artist had multiple retrospectives and, according to his biography on the foundation website, taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Mills College.
Los Angeles Times
19 hours ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Arnaldo Pomodoro, world-renowned Italian sculptor with California ties, dies at 98
ROME — Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Pomodoro's massive spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed-out interiors that Pomodoro has said referred to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors. In a note of condolences, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro's 'wounded' spheres 'speak to us today of the fragility and complexity of the human and the world.' The Vatican's sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna Courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. 'In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,' the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere. The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter (10 foot, eight inch) diameter 'Sphere Within Sphere' sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The U.N. sphere has refers to the coming of the new millennium, the U.N. said: 'a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,' and 'a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world,' Pomodoro said of it. Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project. In the 1960s, he taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Mills College. 'Rotante dal Foro Centrale,' part of Pomodoro's 'Sfera con Sfera' series, can be found at the west entrance of the Berkeley campus. In 1988, Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita presented the sculptor's 'Colpa d'ala (Wing Beat)' as a gift to Los Angeles to mark the 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. It is installed downtown at the Department of Water and Power (now the John F. Ferraro Building). Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926. In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines. Winfield writes for the Associated Press.
