The Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro has passed away 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.
Born in 1926 in Morciano di Romagna, Italy, Pomodoro emerged as one of the most innovative sculptors of the 20th century, transforming metal into poetic meditations on time, decay, and human endeavour. His work—marked by intricate, fractured surfaces that reveal hidden geometries—bridges the ancient and the avant-garde, earning him a place among the greats of modernist sculpture.
Pomodoro’s early career was rooted in stage design and goldsmithing, disciplines that honed his precision and theatrical sensibility. By the 1950s, he turned to sculpture, experimenting with the molten potential of bronze. His signature style—polished exteriors ruptured by corroded, labyrinthine interiors—evokes both the perfection of machinery and the inevitability of erosion. Works like Sphere Within a Sphere (1963), now displayed in Vatican City and Trinity College Dublin, encapsulate this duality: celestial in form yet fractured like a relic of some future archaeology.
“I have never believed in foundations that celebrate a single artist as unique. The artist is part of a cultural tissue; his active contribution can never be lost, and that is why I conceived my foundation as an active and living place of cultural elaboration, as well as a centre of documentation of my work, capable of making original proposals and not just passive preservation. But the best must be yet to come: this has only been the beginning, and in my intentions, the project –aimed at young people and the future – must take root, make continuity an inescapable element…”
An uncompromising innovator, Pomodoro expanded his practice beyond traditional plinths, creating monumental public installations that engage urban spaces as living collaborators. His Rotating Sun in Darmstadt or the Papyrus in Los Angeles are not mere objects but encounters, inviting viewers to trace the scars of time under gleaming surfaces.
Honoured with the Praemium Imperiale and a retrospective at the Guggenheim, Pomodoro’s legacy endures in his ability to make bronze speak—not as a static medium but as a living testament to resilience and rupture. Now in his late nineties, his studio in Milan remains a forge of ideas, where echoes of the past meet the uncertain gleam of the future.
“I want the viewer to feel the tension between destruction and creation,” he once said. In Pomodoro’s hands, even the most brutal metal breathes.
Top Photo: Pomodoro by Pino Montisci, Creative Commons