Arnaldo Pomodoro created The Pietrarubbia Group to commemorate Pietrarubbia, a derelict Italian village near his Central Italian hometown of Morciano di Romagna. “I felt duty bound to deal with my memories,” he explained, “and I wanted to make sense out of that situation, those fragments of a culture that were being destroyed.” Pomodoro has called this work both a “village-sculpture” and “a vision of an archaic settlement.” The work itself stands in for the village: the scratched, jagged writing on the walls—a memento of times past—attests to life within this forgotten society.

Pomodoro’s juxtapositions of divergent materials and textures create contrasts between the interior and exterior surfaces of his sculptures. He works back and forth, as he has put it, “between lucidity and obscurity.” Metaphors for the earth and the universe are clearly apparent in Pomodoro’s production, and his references stretch forward and backward in time. The expressive surfaces of his sculptures allude to written language, while highly polished areas evoke a utopian technological world. Pomodoro honed his skills in developing intricate patterns and designs in metal while working in the 1950s as a jewelry designer.