Eduardo paolozzi paintings, bio, ideas

Summary of Eduardo Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi was a prolific and inventive artist most known for his marriage of Surrealism’s early principles with brave new elements of popular culture, modern machinery and technology. He was raised in the shadows of World War II in a family deeply affected by the divisive nature of a country involved in conflict, which birthed his lifelong exploration into the many ways humans are influenced by external, uncontrollable forces. This exploration would come to inform a vast and various body of work that vacillated between the darker and lighter consequences of society’s advancements and its so-called progress. On the one hand, he would create abstract sculptures, which were dark and brutal in both material and form, portraying the idea of man as a mere assemblage of parts in an overall machine. On the other hand, he would create collages, brighter in nature that reflected the way contemporary culture and mass media influenced individual identity. Some of these collages, with their appropriation of American advertising’s look and feel would inspire the future Pop art movement.

Career

Luigi Paolozzi moved to Paris after graduating from school. His stay in Paris would influence his later life as he became acquainted with Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Leger, and Constantin Brancusi among others. He became a proponent of Surrealism during his stay in Paris and made sculptures and collages by such a culture. His collages included clippings cut from magazines.

Paolozzi returned to London in 1949, to establish a studio in Chelsea. He used several materials and object for his works, especially for collages. His screen prints and Art Brutt sculptures made him popular at the time.

In 1952, he founded the Independent Group, made up of a group of artists who were not content with modernism and forerunners of the mid-1950s British and late 1950s American Pop Art movements. One of his collages, “I was a Rich Man’s Plaything” in 1947 is regarded as one of the foremost representation of Pop Art.

In 1955, he established Hammer Print Limited in Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex alongside Nigel Henderson. The company produced wallpapers and textile designs. He worked with a wide range of media throughout his career, becoming more associated with sculpture making. He is known for making lifelike monumental works.

The Mature Art of Eduardo Paolozzi

During the 1950s, Paolozzi’s primary artistic focus was the suffering human form. In the next decade, he further incorporated the theme of modern machinery into his art, a feature that was already responsible for putting this artist on the map of modern art. Aluminum became Paolozzi’s new material of choice as he littered his work with discarded machine parts. This was an interesting new feature in his work as it linked him to the early avant-garde art and ready-made pieces. Through his industrial art, Eduardo Paolozzi aimed at making a social statement about man’s role in the age of growing technology. Later in his life, this author spent much of his time working on abstract art, exploring printmaking techniques and reliefs. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Paolozzi continued to accept public commissions on a regular basis, working on artworks like his 10-foot bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton. Eduardo Paolozzi died after a long period of illness in 2005.

Main Achievements of His Biography ( 1924–2005 )[5]

Thanks to his incredible works of art that attempted to bridge the gap between the rapid development of technology and artistic traditions, Eduardo Paolozzi established himself as a prominent member of the international Pop Art. He was also one of the most unique and distinctive authors of the movement, which is saying a lot since Pop Art was so diverse and rich with characteristic artists. Maybe the greatest of Paolozzi’s achievements was his embrace of technology — rather than perceiving it as a sort of demon to be feared, Eduardo insisted that 20th-century art and culture must not reject the results of the industrial development but rather use it and creatively profit from such a correlation.

References:

Paolozzi, E., Eduardo Paolozzi, Whitechapel Gallery, 2017
Collins, J., Eduardo Paolozzi, Lund Humphries; New edition, 2014
Spencer, R., Paolozzi, E., Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, Oxford University Press, 2001
Anonymous, Eduardo Paolozzi, Guggenheim Museum
Whitford, F. (2005), Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, The Guardian

Featured image: Eduardo Paolozzi — Photo of the artist — Image via mattfraser4.com
All images used for illustrative purposes only.

Teaching Career

Luigi Paolozzi taught in several schools as a sculpture and ceramics instructor. He started his teaching career with London’s Central School of Arts and Design from 1949 to 1955. From 1960 to 1962, he taught at HochschulefürbildendeKünste Hamburg and the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.

Luigi Paolozzi also instructed at the Royal College of Art. Paolozzi also had some teaching collaborations with Germany, as he worked with the Berlin Artist Programme of the German Academic Exchange Programme from 1974. From 1977 to 1981, Luigi Paolozzi served as a professor at the Fachhochschule in Cologne and the Akademie der BildendenKünste in Munich.

Early Career Choices

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was born on the 7th of March in the year of 1924, in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland. He was an only child in a family of Italian descent. In 1943, young Paolozzi enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art with the intention of becoming a commercial artist and using his creativity to make a living. Although he was slowed down a bit by his short stint in the Royal Pioneer Corps, he transferred to the London’s St. Martin’s School of Art in 1944 and graduated by the following year at this prestigious UK institution. When the World War II came to a halt and the rifles became silent around the Old Continent, Luigi Paolozzi changed his career path and begun studying sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. He stayed there until the year of 1947 when Paolozzi completed his course at this institution.

Accomplishments

Paolozzi’s early love of American culture and the collecting of its paraphernalia would lead him to make collages that were credited for launching the Pop art movement. He was the first to appropriate images from advertisements to create work representative of the shinier, happier lifestyles that were touted in American magazines and media.
Paolozzi was fascinated by the relationship between humans and machinery and often depicted biomorphic forms in his work as demonstrative of both. He incorporated metal parts such as nuts, bolts and bits of scrap into figurative forms to create rudimentary albeit cohesive new representations of the body, demonstrating the influences of progress and technology, subliminally enforced upon an individual’s identity. The figures reflected a communal inner angst.
Surrealism and Cubism influenced Paolozzi greatly and strains of each can be seen throughout his work, regardless of medium, in the way he continued to pair disparate imagery, disjointed forms, and subconscious ephemera.

Works

During the 1960’s Luigi Paolozzi did series of refined graphics works which he explored and expanded the possibilities and limits of the silkscreen medium. His works include As Is When, Moonstrips Empire News, Universal Electronic Vacuum, and General Dynamic Fun.

His most notable works include the patterned mosaic walls of the Tottenham Court Road tube station, the cover of Paul McCartney’s album Red Rose Speedway, ceiling panels and window tapestry at Cleish Castle and the Piscator sculpture outside Euston Station, London. Others include

Relief aluminum doors for the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Gallery the bronze sculpture Newton after Blake, 1995, in the piazza of the British Library and the Head of Invention sculpture on the South Bank in front of the Design Museum.

Early life

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was born on March 7, 1924, in Leith, Edinburgh in Scotland. He was the only child of parents with Italian descent. At the age of 16 in 1940, he was detained with other Italian men for three months at the Saughton prison after Italy declared war on the United Kingdom.

His father, uncle, and grandfather were part of the 446 Italians who drowned aboard theArandora Star, to Canada, which was sunk by a German U-boat. In 1943, Paolozzi studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and later at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1944. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London in 1944 and graduated in 1947.

Useful Resources on Eduardo Paolozzi

Books
websites
articles
video clips

Books

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
biography

Eduardo PaolozziOur Pick

By Judith Collins
Eduardo Paolozzi: The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit 1967-1980
By David Brittain
Eduardo Paolozzi — Collaging Culture
Edited by Miranda Harrison
Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi: Hammer Prints Ltd 1954-75
By Michelle Cotton

websites

articles

video clips