Eduardo Paolozzi

One of my early heroes today – Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 – 2005). Paolozzi, the son of Italian parents, was born in Edinburgh in 1924. In 1943 he studied at the College of Art in Edinburgh in 1944 at the St Martin's School of Art and finally at the Slade School of Art in Oxford from 1945 to 1947, after which he worked in Paris. While in Paris from 1947–1949, Paolozzi became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. This period became an important influence for his later work.
After Paris, he moved back to London eventually establishing his studio in Chelsea. The studio was a workshop filled with hundreds of found objects, models, sculptures, materials, tools, toys and stacks of books. Paolozzi was interested in everything and would use a variety of objects and materials in his work, particularly his collages. Largely a surrealist, Paolozzi came to public attention in the 1950s by producing a range of striking screenprints and ‘Art Brut’ sculpture.

1949 Forms on a Bow

Paolozzi was co-founder of the Independent Group in London in 1952/53, which discussed thoughts of including trivial culture and that way gave decisive impulses for the development of English Pop-Art.
Paolozzi's I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) is considered the first standard bearer of Pop Art and first to display the word ‘pop’. Paolozzi showed the collage in 1952 as part of his groundbreaking Bunk! series presentation at the initial Independent Group meeting in London.

1947 I was a Rich Man's Plaything

He taught sculpture and ceramics at a number of institutions, including University of California, Berkeley in 1968, and at the Royal College of Art. Paolozzi has a long association with Germany, having worked in Berlin from 1974 as part of the Artists Exchange Scheme. He was a professor at the Fachhochschule in Cologne from 1977 to 1981, and later taught sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. Paolozzi was fond of Munich and many of his works and concept plans were developed in a studio he kept there, including the mosaics of the Tottenham Court Road Station in London.

Tottenham Court Road Underground station

He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Paolozzi decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.

Suomi tableware

Paolozzi’s graphic work of the Sixties was highly innovative. In a series of works he explored and extended the possibilities and limits of the silkscreen medium. The resulting prints, characterised by Pop culture references and technological imagery, look fresh and relevant in the 21st Century. In 1994 Paolozzi gave the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art a large body of his works, and much of the content of his artist's studio. In 1999 the National Galleries of Scotland opened the Dean Gallery to display this collection, and the gallery displays a recreation of Paolozzi's studio, with its contents evoking the original London and Munich locations.
In 2001 Paolozzi suffered a near-fatal stroke. The illness confined him to a wheelchair, and he died in a hospital in London in April 2005.