The career of Arnaldo Pomodoro, a prominent sculptor in the international art scene, now spans more than fifty years. Making his debut at a time when art was moving beyond the non-representational, Pomodoro went on to develop an idea of sculpture in which the three-dimensional geometric paradigm lies at the base of numerous different approaches to the work. On one hand, the breakdown of geometric perfection, through a sort of erosion due to complicated patterns of signs of great symbolic depth, which has also led to the artist to interrogate, in a specific way, the value of sculpture as architectural topos, from column to stele. On the other, the capacity of those same orchestrations of signs to salvage, from the spontaneous identity of sculpture, the value of frontality, of articulated surface, of the natural locus of a symbology that unfolds through continual iterations and variations. Many of the artist's works are famous, from the Sfera grande for the Montreal Expo (now at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome) to the versions of Sfera con sfera for the Cortile della Pigna in the Vatican and for the seat of the United Nations in New York and from the monumental Papyrus for Darmstadt to Novecento, recently set up at the EUR in Rome.
The Catalogo generale of Arnaldo Pomodoro, the fruit of many years' work on the systematic cataloguing of the whole of his sculptural output, covers the full range of works produced by the artist between 1953 and 2003. This is accompanied by the first complete documentary research into the entire existing bibliography.
The catalogue, coordinated by Flaminio Gualdoni, director of the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, is the result of studies of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Archives and represents the first stage in the cataloguing of the artist's entire body of work. The next stage will be the cataloguing of all his scenery design, works of applied art and graphics.
The volume includes introductory essays by uthoritative
critics - and some of the artist's historic fellow travellers - like Giovanni Carandente, Gillo Dorfles, Sam Hunter and Arturo Carlo Quintavalle.
They are followed by a lavish set of colour plates illustrating Pomodoro's most significant works, the first complete bio-bibliographical reconstruction of his corpus and descriptive entries on all of the artist's works.
Flaminio Gualdoni (Cuggiono, 1954) began to contribute to the activities of the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan in 1982 and went on to become director of the Galleria Civica of Modena from 1988 al 1994 and the Musei Civici of Varese from 1995 to 1999. In this last capacity he founded, in 1996, the Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea at the Castello of Masnago. He has taught art history at the Accademia di Brera (Milan) since 1980 and at the Faculty of Conservation of the Cultural Heritage, Bologna-Ravenna, from 2000 to 2003.
Since 1985 he has been a contributor to the art section of the Corriere della Sera and to RadioRAI. He is the scientific director of the magazine FMR. He has published many books, including Turcato (Ravenna 1982), Viggiù. Il Museo Butti (Milan 1982), Arte a Roma 1945-1980 (Milan 1988), Arte italiana. Esperienze degli anni '60/'80 (Turin 1992), Modena. Galleria Civica. Raccolta del disegno contemporaneo (Bologna 1994), Franco Fontana (Milan 1994), Le forme del presente (Turin 1997), Ico Parisi. La casa (Milan 1999), Arte italiana del Novecento (Milan 1999), Arte in Italia 1943-1999 (Vicenza 2000), Il trucco dell'avanguardia (Vicenza 2001) and Giulio Turcato (Milan 2002).
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