ArtistItalianb.1926
Arnaldo Pomodoro
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Arnaldo Pomodoro grew up in Morciano di Romagna in the Marche region and trained as a surveyor before discovering art through goldsmithing. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, working alongside his brother Giò Pomodoro, he developed intricate jewelry and small reliefs in silver and gold - an apprenticeship in miniature that would later scale to monumental proportions. His move to Milan in 1954 brought him into contact with Lucio Fontana, Enrico Baj, and Sergio Dangelo, artists who were each in their own way interrogating the surface of things.
The bronze sphere became his signature form over the following decade. The exterior is polished smooth, almost perfect - then it cracks open to expose gears, cylinders, fractured geometries. Pomodoro spoke of this contrast as a response to civilization itself: a world that presents an orderly face while containing systems of tension underneath. The first major sphere entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964, the same year he won the National Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. A year earlier he had taken the International Sculpture Prize at the São Paulo Bienal.
Over the following decades, versions of "Sfera con Sfera" (Sphere Within Sphere) were acquired by the United Nations headquarters in New York - donated by Italy in 1996 as a symbol of global peace - Trinity College Dublin, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., Tel Aviv University, and the Vatican Museums. The spheres vary enormously in scale, from desktop objects to works measuring three meters or more in diameter. Pomodoro also produced large standing columns, rotating discs, and architectural installations, and his foundational jewelry work is represented in collections including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
In 1990 he received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, considered the highest international prize in the visual arts. The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, established in Milan in 1995 and opened as a public exhibition space in 2005, functions both as an archive of his work and as a platform for contemporary art. He died at his home in Milan on 22 June 2025, the eve of what would have been his 99th birthday.
On the Nordic auction market, Pomodoro appears primarily through Italian auction houses, with 20 items recorded across platforms including Pandolfini and Wannenes. Works range from corporate bronzes - reliefs and awards created for Italian companies such as SNAM and Finsider - to jewelry editions and small-scale sculptures. The top result recorded at Auctionist is 7,000 EUR for a bronze award piece from 2010 (edition 5/25). His work also appears occasionally at Swedish houses including Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk.