Museums

Innumerable digital counters, displaying numbers in red light, flash on and off. The numbers appear in order from one to nine at different speeds. Then the display goes dark, rather than showing a zero, and begins again at one. Some counters are started by a signal from other counters which have finished counting to nine. They present the eternal flow of time to viewer's eyes, leaving them floating on a sea of time enveloped in red light. Signal counters can be seen as individuals and the entire group as an organization. It is possible to imagine this work representing all sorts of parts and wholes: countries and the world, planets and the universe, cells and the body, grains of sand and sandy desert. Everything in the world come into being, exists for a time, and eventually disappears, and this process is repeated endlessly. Time flows in the same way for everything that exists in this world, but the sense of time differs for different individual entities and situations. Each entity maintains a gentle connection with its surrounding and they all mark time at their own speed. This work was commissioned for the museum, the title is a statement of Miyajima's three basic concepts, and it represents a culminating point in Miyajima's art.

Gyroscope of the Sun by Arnaldo POMODORO (1926-) is a large sculpture with a diameter of 4 meters and a total weight of five tons, which consists of a two-part bronze disk surrounded by weathered steel rings. Previously installed outdoors near the museum entrance, the work on this occasion is exhibited indoors having been restored in correspondence to the museum’s renovation.
Drawing inspiration from a medieval armillary sphere, and described by the artist himself as expressing the way in which contrasting subjects such as sun and earth, earth and moon, and morning and night change their positional relationship with the passage of time, the bronze disk had formerly been equipped with a mechanism that enabled each of its parts to slowly rotate over the course of 24 hours.
Pomodoro was born in 1926 in Rome, Italy, and after completing his studies in architecture and stage design, commenced his full-fledged practice as a sculptor. Ever since he has continued to combine traditional blacksmithing methods with techniques of modern sculpture to produce various works using bronze as his main material. Gaining high acclaim for his boldly dynamic and distinct style, he has received numerous awards and honors in international exhibitions. While the myriad of geometric forms as well as the rifts engraved upon the disk like deep vales serve to further emphasize the three-dimensionality and multifaceted nature of the work, the changes in light within the exhibition space instills it with a different impression every time it is viewed.