Milan is honoring Arnaldo Pomodoro with a retrospective at the Gallerie d’Italia From May 29 to October 18, an immersive exhibition on the sculptor who captured the spirit of an era

One year after the passing of the Romagna-born sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro and on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, Milan transforms the artist’s cultural legacy into an exhibition open to the public. From May 29 to October 18, the Gallerie d'Italia in Piazza Scala will host Arnaldo Pomodoro: A Life, the major exhibition dedicated to one of the most iconic Italian artists of the twentieth century, who transformed sculpture into a monumental, urban, and almost cinematic language.

Promoted by Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo together with the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, the exhibition arrives as an inevitable but also necessary tribute: because Pomodoro’s fractured spheres have never been just works of art, but collective symbols, fragments of imagination that have crossed decades of global visual culture. From Milan to New York, passing through the Vatican and Los Angeles, his sculptural lexicon has become an integral part of contemporary public space.

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and Federico Giani, the exhibition unfolds as the story of a long artistic trajectory, tracing more than sixty years of research: from the experimental beginnings of the 1950s to the later works of the 2000s. On display will be forty-five works from the Intesa Sanpaolo Collections and the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, in a journey that moves decade after decade through the construction of a unique aesthetic universe of polished surfaces and deep fractures.

The exhibition will not simply be a celebratory retrospective. The project aims to restore the visionary dimension of the artist, also showcasing archival materials, lesser-known works, and documents that allow viewers to read his production beyond the most iconic images. A curatorial choice intended to place the artist within a more vivid, experimental, and radical dimension. The exhibition design itself also plays a central role. In fact, the show reprises some of the display structures conceived by Pomodoro himself throughout his career, transforming the journey into a sort of immersion into his way of conceiving space. Not just works, then, but an environment built to enter his imagination, shaped by tension, balance, and disintegration.