Sfera, Studio

Name: Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926)
Brand: Sfera, Studio
Price: 300000.00 EUR
Availability: SoldOut

Price Realised EUR 375,000

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EUR 200,000 - EUR 300,000

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Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926)

Sfera, Studio

Price Realised EUR 375,000

Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926)
Sfera, Studio
incised with the artist’s signature and date 'A. Pomodoro 1965' (along the lower edge)
bronze
diameter: 35cm.
Executed in 1965, this work is number one from an edition of one plus one artist’s proof

Private Collection, Japan.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York, 8 November 1988, lot 49.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.

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Lot Essay

‘The perfection of Brâncuși was so beautiful and mysterious … at a certain moment I said to myself, really this perfection of the form in our time is inappropriate; it has to be destroyed’ – Arnaldo Pomodoro

Arnaldo Pomodoro’s (1965) is a gleaming early example of the artist’s most iconic signature form. A perfect, polished orb of bronze is split jaggedly round its equator, revealing an interior of glinting geometric circuitry. While his earliest sculptural reliefs had reflected a fascination with the strange, alien forms of ‘writing’ found in Paul Klee’s works, Pomodoro started to explore new celestial shapes following a pivotal visit to the United States in 1959. Already fascinated by the technological advances of the Space Race—and in particular by the flawless sphere of Russia’s Sputnik satellite, which had launched in 1957—he was struck in New York’s Museum of Modern Art by the sleek, futuristic refinement of the sculptures of Constantin Brâncuși, as well as by Jackson Pollock’s gestural Abstract Expressionism. The juxtaposition of modernist polish with more violent forms of mark-making would become characteristic of Pomodoro’s mature works: the present work’s golden globe gapes with a crystalline wound.
‘I set up a contrast to their smooth and polished parts, a discordant tension, a completeness made out of things that are incomplete,’ Pomodoro explained of his sculptures. ‘This very same act is a way of freeing myself from an absolute form. I destroy it. But also multiply it. Sculpture for me is a process of excavation and relief, without defining a space, and without establishing a centre’ (A. Pomodoro quoted in G. Carandente, , exh. cat. Hakone Open Air Museum, Hakone 1994, p. 24). Opening into a filigree of complex texture, is a profoundly enigmatic presence. It seems both an organic object and artificial structure; it echoes the internal workings of bodies and machines alike; it might be a Rosetta-stone-like relic, or a sci-fi beacon from a future technological age. Indeed, working in the traditional ‘lost-wax’ casting technique, Pomodoro’s process dialogues with thousands of years of human creativity. At once viscerally primal and intricately worked, resounds with an aura of mythic, cosmic revelation.

This work is recorded in Archivio Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, under number .