Arnaldo Pomodoro, the postwar Italian artist known for his monumental bronze spheres, died on Sunday at his home in Milan at the age of 98. His death was confirmed by his niece Carlotta Montebello, who is director general of Mr. Pomodoro’s foundation in Milan.
Mr. Pomodoro was a self-taught artist who trained as an engineer and goldsmith. His imposing bronze spherical sculptures stand outside the U.N. headquarters in New York, inside Vatican City, on the campus of Trinity College Dublin, and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among 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. Glenn D.
Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said in an email in 2021 that Mr. Pomodoro’s spheres “were widely admired at the time for their resonance with other postwar Expressionist movements.”
Mr.
Pomodoro’s iconic bronze spheres
Pomodoro’s spheres began to gain worldwide attention in the 1960s. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963 and the National Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale the following 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.
Pomodoro’s massive spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed-out interiors. Pomodoro has said these works refer to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors. 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.”
One of his well-known works is the sphere in the Vatican Museums’ Pigna courtyard, which 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,” Pomodoro had said about this sphere. The United Nations received a 3.3-meter diameter “Sphere Within Sphere” sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The UN sphere refers to the coming of the new millennium, described by Pomodoro as “a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms” and “a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world.”
Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926.
In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects, and machines. He held multiple retrospectives and taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Mills College, according to his biography on the foundation website.
