On the occasion of the centenary of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s birth, Tornabuoni Art brings together works by Pomodoro and Ettore Sottsass under the gaze of Ugo Mulas, a privileged witness to their friendship and to Milan’s post-war art scene. Bronzes, enamels, ceramics and archival photographs trace nearly twenty years of dialogue between sculpture, design and photography.

Three pillars of Milan’s artistic scene, sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, designer Ettore Sottsass and photographer Ugo Mulas left an indelible mark on both public and private space, as well as on collective memory, far beyond the city in which they met. One year after Pomodoro’s death, Pomodoro & Sottsass: a friendship seen by Ugo Mulas celebrates their intertwined paths and the fertile dialogue that helped make Milan one of the most influential creative laboratories of the twentieth century.

A major figure in post-war Italian art, Arnaldo Pomodoro began his career designing jewellery before turning to sculpture in the late 1950s. It was then that he met Ugo Mulas, a central figure in the artistic ferment of the period, who had distinguished himself, from his first reportage at the Venice Biennale in 1954, through an approach centred on artists and the genesis of their work. A deep friendship developed between the two men and would last for more than two decades, during which Mulas accompanied the emergence of Pomodoro’s sculptural language, founded on geometric forms whose surfaces he fractured to reveal their inner mechanisms.

At the same time, Pomodoro and Sottsass’s first exhibition together in 1958 marked the beginning of a collaboration that would prove decisive for both artists. Numerous joint exhibitions followed, culminating in the apartment designed by Sottsass for Pomodoro in 1968. It was here that Mulas captured the friendship between the two artists in a rare candid photograph, presented in the exhibition, which echoes the authenticity of their relationship. As demonstrated by the poster for the 1958 exhibition and the drawing Sottsass gave Pomodoro in 1978, both also on view, their relationship extended beyond formal influence and was characterised by deep mutual esteem and enduring support.

Curated by Alberto Salvadori, director of the Archivio Mulas and a member of the scientific committee of the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, the exhibition seeks to highlight the cross-disciplinary exchange embodied by the three artists. Ten bronze works by Pomodoro, spanning fifty years of the artist’s career, will enter into dialogue with ten original works by Sottsass, including three Totems from the second half of the 1960s, among the designer’s earliest objects conceived without a specific function.

The works will be accompanied by archival photographs, some previously unpublished, depicting the artists and their works in the studio, at Olivetti, with which Sottsass collaborated for many years, as well as in the public and private spaces of Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. These images bear witness to the permeability between the artistic, industrial, private and public spheres that characterised post-war Italy. As Alberto Salvadori writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, «perhaps it was precisely from encounters and associations such as these that the idea - or rather the necessity - arose to reset tradition, to find a new method, a new model of representation.»

The illustrated catalogue, edited by Alberto Salvadori, will be published by Forma Edizioni on the occasion of the exhibition. It will include texts by Alberto Salvadori and Ivan Mietton, a specialist in the work of Ettore Sottsass. An original exhibition design by architect Charles Zana will immerse visitors in the creative ferment of the era.