Arnaldo Pomodoro
Polished bronze spheres and columns, broken open to show the machinery inside.
Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Romagna in 1926, trained as a surveyor and worked as a goldsmith and stage designer before sculpture. The signature form arrived in the 1960s: a perfect geometric solid — sphere, disc, column, cube — in highly polished bronze, with its surface torn or cut open to reveal a dense interior of teeth, rods and machine-like structures, as though the smooth outside were a shell over something unresolved. His spheres stand at the United Nations in New York, the Vatican Museums, Trinity College Dublin and the Farnesina in Rome. He worked into his late nineties and died in 2025.
Bronzes are editioned, usually in small numbers, at a wide range of sizes from tabletop to monumental, and cast number, foundry, date and size are what a valuation rests on; the same form at two scales is two quite different works. The polished surfaces are the whole point and are unforgiving — scratches, dents and repolishing all show, and a repatinated or over-polished cast loses the contrast between mirror exterior and matt interior that the piece depends on. The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro holds the archive.
If you own a work by Arnaldo Pomodoro
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.