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Lot Essay
The present work is sold with a photo-certificate by the artist dated December 1993.
The sphere is central to Pomodoro's oeuvre. Along with the column it has become the single and most recognisable form in his art. Since he first conceived the idea of a smooth sphere with a 'flawed' interior in 1962-63, it has persisted in his art as an icon of extreme contrasts. The refined, shiny smooth-surfaced exterior of the sphere sharply disrupted by the dark and deep earthy penetrations that reveal a complex interior world inside these perfect forms.
These unique ruptured interiors, apart from being an original idea, imbue this purely geometric shape with a social meaning. There is, in his series of sphere sculptures, a tension and uneasiness which lends itself to different interpretation. The present work, with its smooth highly polished exterior derives its pureness from the works of Constantin Brancusi, whilst the regulated almost geometric interior seems to suggest an almost mechanised internal structure that hints at a bizarre hybrid form of life. Seeming like entire worlds in themselves, Pomodoro's spheres play with an extreme and almost cosmic sense of space and scale. Pomodoro has acknowledged the influence of his fellow compatriot, Lucio Fontana, who started producing spheres from 1960 onwards in the genesis of his own punctured spheres, but as he has observed, Fontana "was very courageous, and he gave me good advice. But my spheres are very different from his because he was working in clay, and the forms were rough, and solid.." (as quoted in S. Hunter, Arnaldo Pomodoro, p. 205).
Throughout the 1960s as commissions for both public and private monuments flooded in Pomodoro developed his series of spheres on an ever-increasing scale. Executed in 1991, the present work is a smaller version of the huge sphere of 1966 which he created for the Montreal Expo and is sold with a certificate signed and dated by the artist Dec '93.
The sphere is central to Pomodoro's oeuvre. Along with the column it has become the single and most recognisable form in his art. Since he first conceived the idea of a smooth sphere with a 'flawed' interior in 1962-63, it has persisted in his art as an icon of extreme contrasts. The refined, shiny smooth-surfaced exterior of the sphere sharply disrupted by the dark and deep earthy penetrations that reveal a complex interior world inside these perfect forms.
These unique ruptured interiors, apart from being an original idea, imbue this purely geometric shape with a social meaning. There is, in his series of sphere sculptures, a tension and uneasiness which lends itself to different interpretation. The present work, with its smooth highly polished exterior derives its pureness from the works of Constantin Brancusi, whilst the regulated almost geometric interior seems to suggest an almost mechanised internal structure that hints at a bizarre hybrid form of life. Seeming like entire worlds in themselves, Pomodoro's spheres play with an extreme and almost cosmic sense of space and scale. Pomodoro has acknowledged the influence of his fellow compatriot, Lucio Fontana, who started producing spheres from 1960 onwards in the genesis of his own punctured spheres, but as he has observed, Fontana "was very courageous, and he gave me good advice. But my spheres are very different from his because he was working in clay, and the forms were rough, and solid.." (as quoted in S. Hunter, Arnaldo Pomodoro, p. 205).
Throughout the 1960s as commissions for both public and private monuments flooded in Pomodoro developed his series of spheres on an ever-increasing scale. Executed in 1991, the present work is a smaller version of the huge sphere of 1966 which he created for the Montreal Expo and is sold with a certificate signed and dated by the artist Dec '93.