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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.
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.
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