Arnaldo Pomodoro (Morciano di Romagna, 1926) is one of the world’s foremost contemporary sculptors.

This exhibition showcases a selection of the artist’s works from the late 1950s to the present day, alongside documentary materials available for public consultation that evoke Pomodoro’s studio and archive. Conceived for the space at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, the exhibition is effectively a large autobiographical “theatre,” one that is both real and mental, historical and imaginative. Four sculptures at the palazzo’s four outer corners offer a foretaste of what’s to come. Once inside, the exhibition is staged as a work in two acts plus interlude, corresponding to the two main galleries that mirror each another, plus a connecting passageway behind.

As a whole, “The Great Theatre of Civilizations” explores Pomodoro’s practice through the pervasive interdependence of the visual and the performing/dramaturgical arts, combining finished final works and how they looked in their design conception dimensions. Concreteness and utopia, sign and archetype, matter and vision, three-dimensional works and two-dimensional documents, sharing in the public space and personal research conducted in the studio and in the archive, all these things combine to form a continuum.

Pomodoro’s works constantly reference a multitude of “civilizations,” evanescent traces of archaic, ancient and modern civilizations, or that are perhaps just a product of fantasy. The resulting indefinable forms, signs and materials belong to both archaeology and futurology, recasting our knowledge and imagery, our experience of time and space, history and myth, not to mention our relationships as human beings with other living species and nature. The seventy-plus years of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s research are chronicled in this vast theatre.

FENDI, Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Roma
From 12 May to 1 October 2023, Monday to Sunday, from 10am to 8pm. Free entry, booking required

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