Arnaldo Pomodoro

Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Boston, Thomas Segal Gallery, Arnaldo Pomodoro, 1984

Sam Hunter & Arnaldo Pomodoro, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, 1995, p. 70

Flaminio Gualdoni, Arnaldo Pomodoro: Catalogo Ragionato della Scultura, vol. II, Milan, 2007, no. 689, p. 622-623, illustrated

“The perfection of Brancusi 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. For me, the ‘destruction’ element in form was my most important discovery, and the most authentic both in terms of myself and my times.” — Arnaldo Pomodoro

Reacting against Constantin Brancusi’s geometric reflective and polished surfaces that transmit a sense of perfection, and motivated by Paul Klee’s cubist surface patterns and Jackson Pollock’s energetic gesturalism, Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy’s most prominent avant-garde representatives of the mid-sixties, led neo-constructivist bronze sculpture towards a new direction. The exploration of negation and destruction of form is one of his recurring themes, through which he conveys a sense of today’s world transformation, addressing the problematic of our age with deliberate surface perforations and erosions. 

The present work depicts Pomodoro’s ambitious approach to sculpture. As the title of the piece indicates, Uccelo: A Brancusi seems to be a direct rejection of one of Brancusi’s most famous works, Bird in Space. Pomodoro’s piece allegorically and literally embodies the theme of destruction as it both breaks from the tradition of sculpture and is itself fragmented in its middle. The contrast between the smooth surface of the triangle and the textured inner layers creates a complex work which interplays with positive and negative space, presence and absence, exquisitely capturing this tension between past and present as well as life and death.