There is a common thread that links the visual arts in Taobuk: the visuals created by the great masters of contemporary art. After Emilio Isgrò and Velasco Vitali, it is Arnaldo Pomodoro to sign the image of the fourteenth edition of the festival, dedicated to the theme of identity. Because everything evolves in the whirlwind of becoming. Neolithic arrows, weapons of war and survival, are in the contemporaneity mouse pointers to access other universes and connect self-identification and otherness. Everything changes, then. What remains is identity. Sometimes hidden, closed in sharp geometric shapes like blades. But it is there that it presses, with an almost ancestral force, to come out. There is all this in the graphics made by Pomodoro for Taobuk 2024, “The antenna of time”. To remind us that the hourglass flows and that the essence claims time and space. And that’s what will happen from 20 to 24 June in Taormina.
Everything evolves in the whirlwind of becoming.
Neolithic arrows, weapons of war and survival, are in the contemporaneity mouse pointers to access other universes and connect self-identification and otherness.
Everything changes. What remains is identity. Sometimes hidden, closed in sharp geometric shapes like blades. But it is there that it presses, with an almost ancestral force, to come out. There is all this in the visual created by Arnaldo Pomodoro, “L’antenna del tempo”, for the fourteenth edition of Taobuk, dedicated precisely to the theme of identity.
To remind us that the hourglass flows and that the essence claims time and space. And that’s what will happen from 20 to 24 June in Taormina.
Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro in 1926, he lived his childhood and training at Pesaro. Since 1954 he lives and works in Milan. His works of the fifteenth are high reliefs where a very unique “writing” emerges unpublished in the sculpture, which is interpreted variously by major critics. In the early sixties he tackles three-dimensionality and develops research on the forms of solid geometry: spheres, disks, pyramids, cones, columns, cubes -in polished bronze- are ripped, corroded, dug in their inmost, with the intent of breaking its perfection and discovering the mystery that is enclosed therein. The formal contrast between the smooth perfection of the geometric shape and the chaotic complexity of the interior will henceforth be a constant in the production of Pomodoro.
In 1966 he was commissioned a sphere of three and a half meters in diameter for the Montreal Expo, now in Rome opposite the Farnesina: it is the passage to the great dimension. This is the first of the many works of the artist that have been placed in public spaces of great suggestion and symbolic importance: in the squares of many cities (Milan, Copenhagen, Brisbane, Los Angeles, Darmstadt)opposite the Trinity College of the University of Dublin, Mills College in California, in the Courtyard of the Pigna of the Vatican Museums, opposite the United Nations in New York, in the Parisian headquarters of UNESCO, in the sculptural parks of Pepsi Cola a Purchase and Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, not far from New York City.
He has created numerous environmental works: from the Project for the Cemetery of Urbino of 1973 dug into the hill of Urbino, then not realized because of local contrasts and problems, to Motion solar soil, the long cement mural for the Symposium of Minoa in Marsala, from the Weapons Room for the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, entrance into the labyrinth, dedicated to the Epic of Gilgamesh, up to the Carapace, the Bevagna winery built for the Lunelli family.
Memorable anthological exhibitions have made him one of the most significant artists on the contemporary scene. Numerous itinerant exhibitions followed one another in Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan. He has dedicated himself to scenography since the beginning of his activity and has created ‘spectacular machines’ for numerous plays, from Greek tragedy to melodrama, from contemporary theater to music.
He taught in the art departments of American universities: Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Mills College.
He has received many awards and important awards: the Sculpture Awards at the Biennials of São Paulo (1963) and Venice (1964); the Imperial Praemium for Sculpture 1990 of the Japan Art Association and the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award of the International Sculpture Center of San Francisco (2008). In 1992 the Trinity College of the University of Dublin awarded him an honorary degree in Literature and in 2001 the University of Ancona one in Building Engineering-Architecture.
For more information on the life and activity of the artist and for any useful information on his works, please refer to the online edition of the Catalogue Raisonné by the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation.
