Born in a family of artists (both his father, Santiago Girola and his brother, Claudio Girola were sculptors), Enio Iommi started practicing sculpture in his father's workshop in 1936. In 1937 he studied drawing in Enrico Forni's atelier in Buenos Aires.

Iommi formed part of the generation of artists who introduced avant-garde in Latin America. In 1946 he was a founder of the Arte Concreto-Invención group, which aesthetic concern was exclusively with the forms, shapes and colors, dissociated from any sort of figuration or representation of reality. His works of this period were executed in stainless steel, aluminum, wood, bronze and acrylics. From 1977 he radically changed his style, producing assemblages and installations as a way of making a criticism to the country's government, the Military junta.

After 2001 Iommi shifted towards a style free of complexities and produced works of a humoristic nature, by finding new functions and uses for everyday objects. Iommi exhibited in 1989 in the Hayward Gallery, London in the show Art in Latin America, in 1990 in the Arte Concreto-Invención/Arte Madí 1945-1970 exhibition held at the Museum of constructive Art in Zurich and at the touring exhibition Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, organized by the Museum of Modern Art of New York. In 2003 an anthological one-man show was held in his home town of Rosario.