Following the digitization campaign entrusted in 2024 to the Digital Center ARCHiVe of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, the complete collection of Ugo Mulas’s photographs is now available in the Online Archive. From the early 1960s until his death in 1973, Mulas documented Arnaldo Pomodoro’s work, creating images that were deeply cherished by the artist and have since become iconic within the narratives of both their artistic journeys—such as the jewelry series, the Rotanti sul Ticino photo shoot, and the overhead portrait of the artist with Sfera n. 1.
This visual and material heritage is of outstanding significance, not least due to the exceptional artistic quality of the images: over 2,500 prints ranging from vintage photographs and contact sheets, bearing various Studio Mulas stamps and numerous working annotations by Pomodoro on the reverse. These include shots featured in publications that are fundamental to the narrative of Pomodoro’s artistic journey—such as Libro per le sculture di Arnaldo Pomodoro—or images that appear on posters for the artist’s most memorable exhibitions, including Una scultura nella strada (Milan, 1970), Sculture nella città (Pesaro, 1971), and his first retrospective at the Rotonda della Besana (Milan, 1974).
In addition to documenting the work and professional life of Arnaldo Pomodoro, these photographs by Ugo Mulas offer a glimpse into their profound creative synergy and mutual trust, a bond fueled by a fraternal friendship that began at the tables of Milan’s Bar Jamaica.
In 2024, the high-resolution digitization of all Ugo Mulas' photographic documentation was entrusted to the Digital Centre ARCHiVe of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. They utilized the Replica 360 Recto/Verso Scanner, a cutting-edge scanner specifically designed and built by engineers from Factum Arte and Factum Foundation for the digitization of photographic archives.
The folders containing documentation photos of the artworks have been renamed with the internal AP archive code and the title of the work, while those for openings, exhibition setups, or other events are named after the event itself. For each folder, the most significant photographs have been selected for publication in the gallery, and the total number of images within the folder has been calculated, so as to make it clear to the user in which cases there are more images in the folder than are available online.
