Gonzalo Sanchez |
Rome (EFE) And visiting it is possible thanks to the exhibitions it houses, the latest by the famous sculptor Armando Pomodoro.
The so-called “Square Colosseum” is the epicenter of the EUR, a neighborhood with a rationalist aesthetic built by the fascist dictatorship to host the Universal Exhibition in Rome in 1942, which was never held due to the outbreak of World War II.
The building is a kind of modern reinterpretation of the famous Flavian Amphitheatre, with a perfectly square floor plan, clad in marble and with six rows of arches as the façade of its four faces.
The idea was for it to represent “Italian civilization” and that is why the definition coined by the dictator Benito Mussolini is still sculpted on its heights: “A people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators and transmigrants”.
However, far from that “black” past, the building is today the most modern and luxurious face of the Eternal City, since in 2015 the fashion firm Fendi, founded on its streets ninety years earlier, rented it to turn it into a its brand new headquarters.
Designers, creatives and other staff from this house work in the building, owned by the French colossus LVMH since 2001, but in recent times it has decided to turn its ground floor into a museum in which it exhibits avant-garde works from time to time.
Pomodoro, the hidden movement
The latest exhibition, open until October 1, is entitled “The great theater of civilizations” and consists of a retrospective of the seventy-year career of one of the best-known Italian modern sculptors, Arnaldo Pomodoro.
His works, generally robust metal bodies that reveal gears and geometric shapes inside, are distributed throughout the two rooms on the lower floor of the building, under the light from the large windows that cover the arcades of the façade.
These are large panels or spheres soaked in action, such as the work “Movimento in piena aria e nel profondo (1996/1997), a large white table that evokes the dance of celestial bodies.
Pomodoro (Morciano di Romagna, 1926) sculpts large volumes of reliefs in an apparently chaotic but obviously logical order, offering a journey into the depths of matter itself but also of human existence.
Well, in his works you can appreciate evocations to the pictograms of Asian writing, the rudeness of prehistory or the tribal features of deep Africa.
A style inspired by his encounter in 1961 with an Aztec calendar in Mexico: “I see movement through its original instrument, the wheel, source of energy and measure of time,” he says.
“The Civilization that gives name to this building for Pomodoro becomes ‘civilizations’. A theme that crosses space and time, from the remotest past to an imaginary future”, explains the curator of the exhibition, Andrea Viliani.
The goal is to make the works dialogue with each other to “rediscover ancient civilizations” from Mesopotamia to Assyria, Babylon or Aztec, to African or Greco-Roman arts and cultures.
The visitor will be able to investigate the creative archive of this artist, snooping through drawers where his most recognized works are exhibited, such as his monolith in Copenhagen (1999) or the hollow spheres that he has distributed over half the planet.
But, as it could not be otherwise, in this building, the headquarters of Roman fashion, some of his works for the theater and opera are also exhibited, such as the sets and costumes he made for an “Oedipus Rex” (1988) or for “Dido, Queen of Carthage (1986).
