Ugo Mulas fotografa Arnaldo Pomodoro

The initiative, curated by Angela Vettese, features over 100 images taken by Ugo Mulas from 1959 to 1970, which portray the intense friendship and working relationship between Mulas and Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose studios were located in the same building in Milan.

In Ugo Mulas’s photos (1928–1973), there is almost the entire body of Pomodoro’s work over more than ten years. These images reveal Pomodoro’s artistic and personal journey: his first exhibition at an American gallery, the Marlborough; the room at the Venice Biennale; the large spheres photographed on the rocky sands of the Ticino as if they were pierced planets or lunar concretions; portraits with his brother Giò… and, above all, the spark that ignited this extraordinary relationship: the Full-Length Portrait, the result of a playful moment, as Pomodoro himself recalled: “It all started in 1959 with a portrait born from a curious situation. I had arrived at his studio in Piazzetta Guastalla wearing a jacket. Usually, then as now, I don’t wear one. Ugo, surprised and intrigued, asked me to pose in front of the backdrop he had just used for a men’s fashion shoot. And so, somewhat as a game and with much irony, my first portrait was born.”

Ugo Mulas loved photographing sculpture more than painting because it made him less passive, allowing him to play with shadows and perspectives. While a painting suggests a static attention, sculpture allows and, especially in Pomodoro’s case, demands active engagement. He himself liked to say: Photographing a sculpture means reading the sculpture, it means giving it space, light, and a point of view; photographing a painting means merely performing a banal act of reproduction; photographing a sculpture is like translating a piece of literature from one language to another, moving from the three dimensions to the two dimensions of the photographic sheet, and therefore requires a different language and thus an act of interpretation. It is considerations like these that explain, beyond an unbreakable human bond, why Mulas photographed everything he could of Arnaldo Pomodoro over nearly fifteen years.

On this occasion, a volume is published by Edizioni Olivares, featuring a text by Angela Vettese.