Eduardo Paolozzi

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Paolozzi's Newton, bronze (1995) in the courtyard of the British Library
Paolozzi's Newton, bronze (1995) in the courtyard of the British Library
Paolozzi follows William Blake's 1795 print Newton in illustrating how Isaac Newton's equations changed our view of the world to being one determined by mathematical laws.
Paolozzi follows William Blake's 1795 print Newton in illustrating how Isaac Newton's equations changed our view of the world to being one determined by mathematical laws.
Paolozzi's The Wealth of Nations, located in South Gyle in the sculptor's home town of Edinburgh. The inscription is from Albert Einstein and says, Knowledge is wonderful, but imagination is even better.
Paolozzi's The Wealth of Nations, located in South Gyle in the sculptor's home town of Edinburgh. The inscription is from Albert Einstein and says, Knowledge is wonderful, but imagination is even better.

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, CBE, FRA (March 7, 1924 – April 22, 2005), was a Scottish sculptor and artist.

Paolozzi was born in Leith in north Edinburgh, the eldest son of Italian immigrants. In June 1940, when Italy declared war on Britain, Paolozzi was interned (along with most other Italian men in Britain). During his three-month internment at Saughton prison his father, grandfather and uncle, who had also been detained, were among the 446 Italians who drowned when the ship carrying them to Canada, the Arandora Star, was sunk by a German U-Boat.[1]

He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1943, briefly at the St Martin's School of Art in 1944, and then at the Slade School of Art in London from 1944 to 1947, after which he worked in Paris, France.

Largely a surrealist, Paolozzi came to public attention in the 1960s by producing a range of striking screenprints. Paolozzi was a founder of the Independent Group, which is seen as a precursor to the '60s British pop art movement. His 1947 collage I was a rich man's plaything [2], is sometimes labelled the first true instance of Pop Art, although he always described his work as surrealist. Latterly he became better known as a sculptor. Paolozzi is known for producing largely lifelike statuary works, but with rectilinear (often cubic) elements added or removed, or the human form deconstructed in a cubist manner.

His works include:

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 awarded the CBE in 1968 and in 1979 he was elected to the Royal Academy. During the late 60s he started contributing to literary magazine Ambit, which began a lifelong collaboration. He became the Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1986, holding the office until his death. He became Sir Eduardo Paolozzi upon his knighthood in 1989.

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 (causing an incorrect magazine report that he had died).

However, illness confined him to a wheelchair, and he died in a hospital in London in April 2005.

[edit] Other work

Eduardo Paolozzi played a deaf-mute in Lorenza Mazzetti's Free Cinema film Together, alongside the painter Michael Andrews (1955).

[edit] External links