Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi was a Scottish artist, designer and sculptor of Italian descent, whose work covers a wide variety of areas of fine art, from large-scale sculptures to the design of fabrics and wallpapers. As an innovative artist, Paolozzi always looked for something fresh, yet unknown in the art. Due to his insatiable thirst for change and constant experiments, his work is heterogeneous and resembles a colourful mosaic, consisting of different styles, motifs, genres and art movements.

From childhood, Eduardo Paolozzi had a passion for collecting various interesting items: postcards, packages from different goods, clippings from magazines and newspapers. Many of them demonstrated an American lifestyle, different from Scotland, joyful and carefree. It was Paolozzi who was the first to use popular images of mass culture in art, creating colourful collages. Such masters as Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake developed his ideas, turning Paolozzi’s original finds into a completely new pop art style alternative to all existing techniques; it became the most important style in the art of the 20th century, both in Europe and the USA.

Despite the relevance and prospects of pop art, Eduardo Paolozzi did not keep on working in this style, leaving this opportunity to other artists. Fascinated by the ideas of technological progress, he created sculptures combining various mechanisms with the human body, exploring the interaction of the machine and its creator in such a creative way. His most famous works, which adorn the streets of London, Edinburgh, Munich and other European cities, relate to this topic. For their original combination of history and modernity, sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi are often called “totems of the technological age”.

Key ideas:

– The art of Eduardo Paolozzi takes its roots from Cubism and Surrealism. In his early works, he tried to combine the styles of these two art movements using objects that were not related to each other thematically, as Surrealists did, and placing them in the space of a cubist geometric collage.

– From early childhood, the future artist was interested in American culture, which influenced his manner noticeably. The lifestyle in the USA attracted him with its colourful, carefree, vivid images of animation, advertising and cinema.

– During his two-year stay in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi met such outstanding masters as Brancusi, Giacometti, Arp and Dubuffet, who help him discover the avant-garde European art. Returning to Britain, Paolozzi became a true innovator, since more traditional art was spread in London at that time. He joined the Independent Group, an association of young artists, designers and sculptors, and soon became one of its leaders. His lecture entitled “Bunk!” during which he demonstrated slides with his unusual collages, contributed to a real breakthrough in English avant-garde art.

– A characteristic feature of the artist’s work is the union of the human body and the details of various mechanisms. Eduardo Paolozzi sincerely believed that technology and art should go hand in hand and not compete, and the artist plays the most critical role in promoting this idea. He used a wide variety of mechanical products in his sculptures – gears, bolts, nuts and whole parts of machines, which made the figures look like fantastic robots.

– In his work, Eduardo Paolozzi used the principle of “all come in handy”. This meant that anything would do to create a work of art. In collages, sculptures, decorative panels and mosaics of the artist, in addition to his favorite bolts and nuts, you can find anything: ropes and needles, old dishes and children’s toys. Even when he worked in a flat painting technique or silk-screen printing, such objects were images taken out of context and placed in the space of the picture.