Plaster
Inscribed and dated verso
E. Paolozzi Oxford 82
Displayed in a glazed pine framed box

Provenance
Gift of the artist
Ruskin School of Art Oxford University


Sir Eduardo Paolozzi CBE 1924 – 2005
Born in Scotland, Paolozzi’s Italian parents ran an ice
cream parlour. He was interned as a boy (three months)
along with his father, grandfather and uncle, who were
later deported, tragically perishing in a U-Boat attack.
Paolozzi studied at the Edinburgh College of Art then
the Slade during his evacuation. He travelled to Paris
in 1947 where he lived and worked for three years,
mixing with Surrealists and DADA (photomontage)
exponents Giacometti, Brancusi and Braque. Here, he
also learnt to cast bronze and intuited a ‘concern for
different materials and disparate ideas’, later describing
his love of the French approach ‘the need, the passion,
to consider and handle things at the same time’.
Returning to England, The Independent Group (founding
Member) were shown a fragmented assemblage of
modern world contradictions (culture/machinery) in a
slide show, which was the precursor to Pop Art and a
marker for the Paolozzi oeuvre. │ The plaster works
here, two examples of his generosity to friends to
whom he would give artworks freely as if ice creams! A
third, a maquette /1:10 model for ‘Leonardo’, a large cast
iron work outside the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. One
panel probably represents a conflation of his interest
in musical scores, engineering patterns and weaving
diagrams. ‘Warrior’ (Aztec?) could be related to his time
in museum archives (London/Berlin) in preparation for
his work ‘Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons’
where he looked to ‘subvert the fixed definitions of the
(original) artwork’. ‘I suppose I am interested, above all,
in investigating the golden ability of the artist to achieve
a metamorphosis of quite ordinary things into something
wonderful and extraordinary’. │ As a sculptor,
printmaker, ceramicist (Tottenham Court Tube Station),
Paolozzi was given a number of retrospectives, made
CBE 1968, RA 1979, appointed Her Majesty’s Sculptor in
Ordinary for Scotland 1986 and Knighted in 1988.