Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy’s most prominent contemporary artists, has died 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.
Best known for his massive and shiny bronze spheres with clawed out interiors which decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, the artist sought to comment on the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors.
In a note of condolences, 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.”
The Vatican’s sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna Courtyard of the Vatican Museums, 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,” the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere.
The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter diameter “Sphere Within Sphere” sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. Pomodoro described it as “a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,” and “a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world.”
Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project.
In addition to his spheres, Pomodoro designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines, as well as a controversial fiberglass crucifix for the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – featuring a four-and-a-half-meter diameter crown of thorns which hovers over the figure of Christ.
The artist had multiple retrospectives and, according to his biography on the foundation website, taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Mills College.