Disco n. 1

Like an extra-terrestrial map, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Disco no.1, 1964, evokes a terra incognita. Set within polished bronze, lacerations, excavations, and cracks split the smooth surface of the pristine disc. While his output during the 1950s concentrated mainly on high reliefs from which a sculptural tracery emerged, in the subsequent years, Pomodoro began to explore more dimensional forms, casting discs, spheres, and cubes in burnished bronze. He was fascinated with technological progress, specifically the Russian satellite Sputnik and the space race, and this enthusiasm for technological progress can be seen in the celestial allusions suggested by Disco no.1. Although he worked in bronze, a material associated with both the long history of sculpture and the sleek geometries of Modernist artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Pomodoro perforated the lustrous surface with fissures, incisions, and protrusions. Such striking opposition became a constant of his practice. ‘I set up a contrast to their smooth and polished parts a discordant tension, a completeness made out of things that are incomplete,’ he said. ‘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, Arnaldo Pomodoro, exh. cat., The Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan 1994, p. 24).