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Lot Essay
A dazzling, highly-polished bronze globe over a metre in height is punctuated with intricate fissures that reveal complex interior workings including another ruptured sphere, introducing a complex play of textures and implications of worlds hidden beneath the surface. Executed in 1991, Sfera con sfera is one of Arnaldo Pomodoro's signature spherical sculptures and dates from the year that he was awarded the 'Città del Palladio' prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Where in many of his works, he would leave the supposed 'surface' punctured, revealing the complex workings underneath, here he has added another dimension to this process by allowing the viewer to gaze upon the world-within-a-world that is the inner sphere.
Sfera con sfera reveals Pomodoro's interest in disrupting the sheer and all too idealistic perfection of sculptures such as those of Constantin Brancusi. Pomodoro himself has recalled that seeing the installation of Brancusi's sculptures in the Museum of Modern Art in New York provided an epiphany for him. However, part of that revelation involved the desire to disrupt the pared-back simplicity of Brancusi's forms, which were somehow too idealistic for Pomodoro. Instead, he managed to combine that dimension of sensual perfection in surfaces such as the exterior of Sfera con sfera, yet to introduce the deliberate cracks which allow the viewer to see the 'writings', the interior elements which often resemble the workings of a piano, of an old computer, or even a form of notation.
Pomodoro had already created works that made reference to Paul Klee before his first trip to the United States of America, several decades before Sfera con sfera was created. In many of his earlier works, he used cuttlebone casting, a technique employed by jewellers because of its incredible precision in creating fine, small-scale objects, in order to create his own 'writings' which, like Klee's, were illegible and yet evocative. While devoid of precise signification, they nonetheless played with the concept of language and of communication. In his sculptures, Pomodoro gradually added to these annotations, allowing them to become fully three-dimensional, as is the case inside Sfera con sfera, where small towers of metal form an interior landscape of angled, geometric, crystalline teeth. These contrast boldly with the exterior of the globe; they become visible through the cracks and cavities which Pomodoro has so carefully worked and which resemble the rents in the surface of the Earth after some tectonic cataclysm. A hidden world is thus revealed, a microcosm within the microcosm. And it is a hidden world that demands that we, as viewers, pay close attention to the sculpture: rather than a sheer globe, Sfera con sfera is riddled with details that invite us to cast our eyes slowly and lingeringly across the surface. As Pomodoro himself has explained,
'I care how the details function. I want the view at close quarters to be a totally different but related experience. I insist that the sculpture surfaces be read carefully and slowly, even though just a moment before you saw the ensemble forms as essentially geometric and monumental' (Pomodoro, quoted in S. Hunter, 'Monuments and Anti-monuments', pp. 57-77,F. Gualdoni (ed.), Arnaldo Pomodoro: Catalogo ragionato della sculptura, Vol. I, Milan, 2007, p. 63).
In a sense, looking at Sfera con sfera is experiential, a piece of theatricality with a gradual unveiling as the various strata of the bronze sculpture are teasingly revealed through the deliberate rents of the surface.
Pomodoro's notation-like forms in the interior of Sfera con sfera provide a mute yet eloquent sense of chronicle, of the gritty truths that lie behind the curtains of the perfection or idealism invoked by the exterior. They are rooted in life. In this sense, Pomodoro was reacting to the Action Painters and also by the Beat poets whom he met during his times in the States, and with many of whom he became friends. The writing is his own cursive sculptural script, recalling perhaps the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as the pictures of the Rome-based American artist, Cy Twombly. At the same time, the articulation of the polished surface, combined with the sense of scale of Sfera con sfera, echoes the works and interests of the Abstract Expressionists, as Pomodoro himself explained: 'I was influenced by these large American action paintings, and the original way in which they managed to combine intimate human gesture and monumental scale. You might say that I am trying to resolve a similar structural problem' (Pomodoro, quoted in ibid., p. 63). Sfera con sfera is the perfect embodiment of that balance between macro and micro, as it combines the sheer mass of the gleaming ball of bronze with the intricate, intimate details that it yields to our closer inspection.
That Pomodoro found a means of presenting his 'writing' in three dimensions again parallels the Action Painters; at the same time, the small towers and crisp, jutting forms that are revealed within Sfera con sfera echo the work of one of his own compatriots, Lucio Fontana. An early mentor for Pomodoro, Fontana was the founder of the Spatial movement, arguing for the creation of a new, Spatial art. Pomodoro did not adhere to some of Fontana's ideas, but was encouraged by him in his iconoclasm and his abandonment of the staid precepts formerly associated with sculpture. Like Fontana, Pomodoro came to reference and incorporate space in his work. The resemblance of the smaller elements in Sfera con sfera recall circuitry and the hi-tech era of space travel: the sculpture is the artistic cousin of satellites. At the same time, those same elements ensure that space is very much enmeshed within the fabric of Pomodoro's work as part of his medium. The teeth in Sfera con sfera emphasise this: they surround, penetrate and mould space, insisting on its importance within the sculpture itself, allowing the artist to harness the void, to manipulate it, and to convert it into something potent and beautiful.
Sfera con sfera reveals Pomodoro's interest in disrupting the sheer and all too idealistic perfection of sculptures such as those of Constantin Brancusi. Pomodoro himself has recalled that seeing the installation of Brancusi's sculptures in the Museum of Modern Art in New York provided an epiphany for him. However, part of that revelation involved the desire to disrupt the pared-back simplicity of Brancusi's forms, which were somehow too idealistic for Pomodoro. Instead, he managed to combine that dimension of sensual perfection in surfaces such as the exterior of Sfera con sfera, yet to introduce the deliberate cracks which allow the viewer to see the 'writings', the interior elements which often resemble the workings of a piano, of an old computer, or even a form of notation.
Pomodoro had already created works that made reference to Paul Klee before his first trip to the United States of America, several decades before Sfera con sfera was created. In many of his earlier works, he used cuttlebone casting, a technique employed by jewellers because of its incredible precision in creating fine, small-scale objects, in order to create his own 'writings' which, like Klee's, were illegible and yet evocative. While devoid of precise signification, they nonetheless played with the concept of language and of communication. In his sculptures, Pomodoro gradually added to these annotations, allowing them to become fully three-dimensional, as is the case inside Sfera con sfera, where small towers of metal form an interior landscape of angled, geometric, crystalline teeth. These contrast boldly with the exterior of the globe; they become visible through the cracks and cavities which Pomodoro has so carefully worked and which resemble the rents in the surface of the Earth after some tectonic cataclysm. A hidden world is thus revealed, a microcosm within the microcosm. And it is a hidden world that demands that we, as viewers, pay close attention to the sculpture: rather than a sheer globe, Sfera con sfera is riddled with details that invite us to cast our eyes slowly and lingeringly across the surface. As Pomodoro himself has explained,
'I care how the details function. I want the view at close quarters to be a totally different but related experience. I insist that the sculpture surfaces be read carefully and slowly, even though just a moment before you saw the ensemble forms as essentially geometric and monumental' (Pomodoro, quoted in S. Hunter, 'Monuments and Anti-monuments', pp. 57-77,F. Gualdoni (ed.), Arnaldo Pomodoro: Catalogo ragionato della sculptura, Vol. I, Milan, 2007, p. 63).
In a sense, looking at Sfera con sfera is experiential, a piece of theatricality with a gradual unveiling as the various strata of the bronze sculpture are teasingly revealed through the deliberate rents of the surface.
Pomodoro's notation-like forms in the interior of Sfera con sfera provide a mute yet eloquent sense of chronicle, of the gritty truths that lie behind the curtains of the perfection or idealism invoked by the exterior. They are rooted in life. In this sense, Pomodoro was reacting to the Action Painters and also by the Beat poets whom he met during his times in the States, and with many of whom he became friends. The writing is his own cursive sculptural script, recalling perhaps the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as the pictures of the Rome-based American artist, Cy Twombly. At the same time, the articulation of the polished surface, combined with the sense of scale of Sfera con sfera, echoes the works and interests of the Abstract Expressionists, as Pomodoro himself explained: 'I was influenced by these large American action paintings, and the original way in which they managed to combine intimate human gesture and monumental scale. You might say that I am trying to resolve a similar structural problem' (Pomodoro, quoted in ibid., p. 63). Sfera con sfera is the perfect embodiment of that balance between macro and micro, as it combines the sheer mass of the gleaming ball of bronze with the intricate, intimate details that it yields to our closer inspection.
That Pomodoro found a means of presenting his 'writing' in three dimensions again parallels the Action Painters; at the same time, the small towers and crisp, jutting forms that are revealed within Sfera con sfera echo the work of one of his own compatriots, Lucio Fontana. An early mentor for Pomodoro, Fontana was the founder of the Spatial movement, arguing for the creation of a new, Spatial art. Pomodoro did not adhere to some of Fontana's ideas, but was encouraged by him in his iconoclasm and his abandonment of the staid precepts formerly associated with sculpture. Like Fontana, Pomodoro came to reference and incorporate space in his work. The resemblance of the smaller elements in Sfera con sfera recall circuitry and the hi-tech era of space travel: the sculpture is the artistic cousin of satellites. At the same time, those same elements ensure that space is very much enmeshed within the fabric of Pomodoro's work as part of his medium. The teeth in Sfera con sfera emphasise this: they surround, penetrate and mould space, insisting on its importance within the sculpture itself, allowing the artist to harness the void, to manipulate it, and to convert it into something potent and beautiful.