Eduardo Paolozzi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. 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, 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.
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).
