On the occasion of the centenary of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s birth, Tornabuoni Art brings together works by Pomodoro and Ettore Sottsass through the lens 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.

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The works will be accompanied by archival photographs, some previously unpublished, depicting the artists and their works in the studio, at Olivetti, with which Sottsass collaborated for many years, as well as in the public and private spaces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.

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.