Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi - SKETCHLINE

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March 7, 1924, Edinburgh (Scotland) - April 22, 2005, London (the UK)

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi

description

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.

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi

On Artist

flow

Surrealism

Cubism

Dadaism

Art brut

Pop art

friends

Francis Bacon

Lucian Freud

Alberto Giacometti

artists

Pablo Picasso

Constantin Brancusi

Jean Arp

Jean Debuffet

Max Ernst

By Artist

flow

Pop art

friends

Francis Bacon

artists

Peter Blake

Richard Hamilton

Stephen de Staebler

description

A large bronze sculpture adorns one of the parks of the capital of Great Britain. It consists of abstract and figurative parts, as well as recognizable mechanical parts of industrial production combined into one composition on a low stone pedestal.

1998

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Eduardo Paolozzi completed his sculptural Isaac Newton for installation in front of the new British Library. The sculptor borrowed the scientist’s figure from the colour lithography of Symbolist artist William Blake, in which Newton is depicted with a measuring device in his hand.

1988

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The artist once noticed the plaster head of David Michelangelo in the shop window, where it was placed on a wooden chest of drawers. This strange combination inspired Eduardo Paolozzi, and he created a copy of this cast, cut it into several parts, between which he placed wooden inserts.

1987

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One of the most famous and largest projects by Eduardo Paolozzi is a mosaic at one of the London Underground stations. Having received an order for the design of a room the size of which was a thousand square meters, the artist pondered for a long time on how to make the image understandable to people who look at it while moving.

1979

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In the 1960s, Eduardo Paolozzi was interested in the technology of screen printing, which was actively used by American Pop art artists. He created a series of works in this technique; one of them named “The Silk World of Michelangelo” tells about the relationship between history and modernity, as well as between high art and modern advertising.

1967

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The work is included in a cycle of 12 works entitled “As Is When” made using the silk-screen printing technique. The painting is dedicated to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and consists of a set of bright details, of which two human figures in the middle of the composition with interiors in the form of mechanical elements attract the most attention.

1965

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Eduardo Paolozzi made the mythological character Cyclops, who was huge and had one eye in the middle of his forehead, from parts of various mechanisms. The combination of a humanoid figure and mechanical elements is a frequent occurrence in the work of the artist, who thus expressed his attitude to technological progress.

1957

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Eduardo Paolozzi began to create his early collages under the influence of the works of Cubists and Dadaists, who were the first to use this method in their paintings in the first third of the 20th century. The artist composed “Real Gold” and several other similar works from parts of American newspapers and magazines that were left to him by soldiers temporarily staying in Paris.

1949

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During his two-year stay in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi was fond of Surrealism. He was particularly influenced by famous avant-garde sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who used forms that simultaneously resembled living bodies and mechanical structures.

1949

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The work by Eduardo Paolozzi made in the collage technique, slightly smaller than a sheet for a typewriter, was the first work in the style of Pop art that had not emerged by that time yet. From childhood, the artist was fond of American culture; in his collages, he tried to convey the attractiveness of a calm and well-fed life overseas that was so different from the ruined and poor post-war Europe.

1947