Arnaldo Pomodoro, the Italian sculptor known worldwide for his monumental bronze spheres, died at 98 on June 22nd, the eve of his 99th birthday. His death was confirmed by Carlotta Montebello, the artist’s niece and director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation.
Pomodoro was internationally recognized for his gleaming orbs—polished bronze forms often fractured to reveal jagged interiors. Italian culture minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro’s “wounded” spheres reflect “the fragility and complexity of the human and the world,” according to the Associated Press.
Born in Morciano di Romagna, Italy, in 1926, Pomodoro studied stage design and trained as a goldsmith. From the mid-1940s until 1957, he also worked as a consultant for public restoration projects in Pesaro, Italy. He relocated to Milan in 1954, where he immersed himself in a thriving artist community alongside Lucio Fontana and Sergio Dangelo, among others. He would present his work at Galleria Numero in Florence and at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan that same year. By 1956, he participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time alongside his brother Giò Pomodoro, who died in 2002.
Pomodoro’s breakthrough came in the 1960s. He presented work at the São Paulo Bienal, where he won the International Sculpture Prize, in 1963. The next year, he received the National Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. He became known for large-scale outdoor commissions in cities across the world, including Vatican City, New York, Paris, Florence, and Copenhagen. In 1965, he began working closely with Marlborough Gallery in New York and Milan.
Throughout his life, Pomodoro was the subject of several museum exhibitions at venues such as the University Art Museum at the University of California in Berkeley and Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia, Italy, among others. His 1996 work Sfera con Sfera was gifted by Italy to the United Nations and stands in the plaza outside U.N. headquarters in New York.
Pomodoro continued to produce ambitiously scaled work into old age. For instance, his sculpture Novecento, a towering bronze spiral, was installed in Rome in 2004, when the artist was 78.
Pomodoro also maintained work as a set designer. Notably, he produced designs for productions such as Eugene O’Neill’s Plays of the Sea in Rome in 1996 and Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly in Torre del Lago, Italy, in 2004.
