Image: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan ; Archivio Archivio Ugo Mulas 01
The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro has released a selection of Ugo Mulas’s photographs of Arnaldo Pomodoro through its Online Archive, making publicly accessible a body of images documenting the sculptor’s work from the early 1960s until Mulas’s death in 1973. The release coincides with Pomodoro’s centenary and the anniversary of Mulas’s birth, and was made possible with permission from the heirs of the photographer.
The material comes from a larger photographic heritage comprising more than 2,500 vintage prints and contact sheets. The collection includes images bearing Studio Mulas stamps as well as numerous working annotations by Pomodoro on their reverse. In 2024, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s ARCHiVe Digital Centre in Venice digitized the photographic documentation in high resolution using the Replica 360 Recto/Verso Scanner, developed for photographic-archive digitization by engineers from Factum Arte and the Factum Foundation.
Mulas’s photographs record both finished works and the processes through which Pomodoro’s sculptures were made and presented. The newly available images include workers on scaffolding beside ‘Grande omaggio alla civiltà tecnologica’ in Cologne in 1964, the positioning of ‘Grande disco’ at the Fratelli Brusoni workshop in Milan in 1965, and Pomodoro’s ‘Sfera grande’ installed on the roof of the Italian Pavilion at Expo Montréal in 1967. Other photographs show ‘Forma X’ in Piazza Einaudi during the Milan exhibition ‘Una scultura nella strada’ in 1970 and the installation of Pomodoro’s work at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972.
The archive also includes images associated with recurring subjects in the relationship between the two artists: Pomodoro’s jewelry series, the photographic session for ‘Rotanti sul Ticino’ in 1967, and Mulas’s overhead portrait of Pomodoro with ‘Sfera n. 1’, made in Milan in 1963. According to the Fondazione, these photographs became important images in the accounts of both artists’ careers. They appeared in publications including ‘Libro per le sculture di Arnaldo Pomodoro’ and on posters for exhibitions such as ‘Una scultura nella strada’ in Milan, ‘Sculture nella città’ in Pesaro in 1971, and Pomodoro’s first anthology exhibition at Milan’s Rotonda della Besana in 1974.
The release adds to an institutional record of the pair’s collaboration. A 2008 exhibition, ‘Ugo Mulas fotografa Arnaldo Pomodoro’, curated by Angela Vettese and held at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan from October 3, 2008, to March 22, 2009, presented more than 100 photographs made between 1959 and 1970. The exhibition described the friendship and working relationship between Mulas and Pomodoro, whose studios were in the same Milan building, and was accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with black-and-white illustrations.
Pomodoro wrote that Mulas’s interpretations helped convey how the idea of making sculpture becomes material, capturing both the creative process and the physical labor involved. The Fondazione’s Catalogue Raisonné and Online Archive are ongoing projects created under the artist’s supervision. Both are available free of charge for research and study, with the digitized Mulas photographs now forming part of that online resource.
