Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro in 1926 and spent his childhood and education in Pesaro. He lives and works in Milan since 1954. Pomodoro’s works from the Fifties are high-reliefs, in which emerges a singular form of “writing” previously unknown in sculpture, which aroused the interest of Italy’s most prominent art critics. In the early Sixties he began to address the problem of three-dimensionality and focused his research on the forms of solid geometry, then towards the monumental scale.
His sculptures are found in the most important public collections and sited in urban spaces all over the world. Pomodoro’s environmental works include: Earth and Solar Motion, the long concrete mural for the Minoa Symposium near Marsala, the Armoury in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, Entering the Labyrinth, dedicated to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Carapace cellar in Bevagna for the Lunelli family, unveiled in June 2012.
Memorable retrospectives have consolidated his reputation as one of the most significant contemporary artists. His traveling exhibitions have toured throughout Europe, America, Australia and Japan. Ever since the beginning of his career Arnaldo Pomodoro has also been active in stage design, creating “spectacular machines” for numerous theatrical performances. He has taught in the art departments of various American universities: Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Mills College.
He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards: the Sculpture Prizes at the Biennials of São Paulo (1963) and Venice (1964); the Japan Art Association’s 1990 Imperial Praemium for Sculpture, and the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from San Francisco’s International Sculpture Center (2008). In 1992, he received a degree in the humanities honoris causa from Trinity College Dublin, and in 2001 an honorary degree in architectural engineering from the University of Ancona.
