Jewellery by famed designer and sculptor Giò Pomodoro on display at the Museo Del Gioiello in Vicenza

More than 60 jewellery items by the artist known as the Maestro from the Marche region will be on display at the museum in Vicenza’s Basilica Pallidiana through September 2, 2018. Showing a half-century of creativity of one of the 20th Century’s greatest goldsmiths, engravers and sculptors, it includes numerous items from private collections that rarely are accessible to the public and several examples of his work that were exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 1994.

“Giò Pomodoro Jewellery. The sign and the ornament,” an exhibition of more than 60 pieces by the renowned Italian goldsmith, engraver, sculptor and stage designer, who died in 2002, was inaugurated yesterday at the Museo del Gioiello in Vicenza. It will be opened to the public from today.

The “Giò Pomodoro Jewellery. The sign and the ornament” retrospective will run through September 2018. Curated by Paola Stroppiana, it presents a wide selection of the artist’s production, including many works from private collections that are rarely shown to the public.

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The Museo del Gioiello in Vicenza, which is located in the historic Basilica Palladiana in the center of Vicenza, is the first museum in Italy and one of only a few in the world that are dedicated exclusively to jewellery. It is managed by the Italian Exhibition Group S.p.A. (IEG) in partnership with the Vicenza Municipality.

The exhibition preview was attended by the artist’s son, Bruto Pomodoro, who joined IEG Division Director Jewellery & Fashion Marco Carniello, Museum’s Director Alba Cappellieri and Ms. Stroppiana in explaining the artistry on display and the career of the man known as the Maestro from the Marche region.

Taking place 16 years after his death in Milan, the exhibition reveals the contribution made by Pomodoro, who was born in 1930 in Orciano di Pesaro, a small town in Italy’s Marche region, in the development of the modern conception of “artist jewellery,” where the work in recognised as art in itself, and the codification of this critical phenomenon in post-war Italy.

“Every item of jewellery encompasses a great ability for design,” explained the exhibition curator, Ms. Stroppiana. “The sign, is expressed intellectually through creations of rare beauty, and the ornament is the result of copious research, full of references to classical culture and the ritual-metaphysical dimension. Pomodoro knew how to maintain a close bond with his sculptural works, transposing them into his jewellery, and vice versa, from Tensioni (Tensions) and Folle (Folly) to Gusci (Shells), from Contatti (Contacts) to Soli (Suns). The line of jewellery that he designed for his brother-in-law, Giancarlo Montebello’s company, GEM, in the mid 1970s was one of the first experiments in ‘economic jewellery art.’ It is extremely interesting, as is the compilation in a notebook that containing 38 prototypes of gemstone cuts, many of which are displayed in the exhibition, which was prepared for Cesari & Rinaldi at the beginning of the 1990s.”

The exhibition features a representative selection of Pomodoro jewellery, all on loan from important private collections, with its more than 60 items covering a creative period of almost half a century. It tells a story that evolves from the early 1950s, when the artist shifts from the figurative to informal, with jewellery created from pure gold-embossed sheets and cuttlefish casting. It progresses to the geometrism of the 1970s, where the mechanical element was joined by the distinct use of coloured enamels. These include items that were exhibited at The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 exhibition at the Guggenheim

Museum in New York in 1994. The journey continues through the figurative creativity seen in items from the 1980s, and the serial jewellery, prototypes and new experiments on gemstones that characterised Pomodoro’s work in the 1990s.

Courtesy: The Retail Jeweller News Service