Grande Radar


Grande Radar, 1963 (installed 1974)
Arnaldo Pomodoro
University of Chicago
Cochrane-Woods Art Center 
5540 South Greenwood Avenue

            During a series of interviews conducted by Mark Rosenthal, Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro (born 1926) described an experience he had in 1960 that changed the course of his artistic practice. Standing before sculptures by Brancusi at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he realized that the “perfection of form” achieved by the Romanian artist was “inappropriate” for the contemporary age and had “to be destroyed.” Since that time, Pomodoro has continually investigated the metaphor of a “perfect, coherent form being torn asunder.”
            The smooth bronze concave surface is interrupted by deep indentations, resulting in what has been described as the artist’s “intaglio” style, emphasizing the negative effects of recession into a surface. Many of his works engage with fundamental geometric shapes, such as spheres, discs, columns and pyramids. One of his column-shaped works is exhibited on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston and examples of his “Sphere within a Sphere” series are located outside of the United Nations building in New York and in the courtyard of the Vatican in Rome. 

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