SCOTLAND’S greatest modern sculptor, the late Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, is being honoured at Berlin’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art with an exhibition of his work from the key period of his artistic development.
Born in Leith in 1924, Paolozzi is regarded as a co-founder of British pop art, having co-founded the influential London Independent Group, a union of British artists from different disciplines formed during the Second World War that broke with the conventions of aesthetic and academic practice. The Berlinische Galerie focuses on Paolozzi’s idiosyncratic and experimental work of the 1940s to the 1970s with which the artist attracted much international acclaim.
The exhibition brings together his most significant works from private and public collections worldwide, joined by numerous works from the collection of the Berlinische Galerie itself.
Paolozzi spent two years in Berlin in the mid-1970s, producing some of his best work in the German city.
There has not been an exhibition of his work in Germany for 30 years, and when the exhibition opened in Berlin yesterday, there was considerable public demand for tickets.
The Galerie stated: “He entered the annals of international art history in the 1940s with a series of collages combining images from popular culture and advertising, pre-empting key hallmarks of pop art. The powerful sculptures and prints that marked Eduardo Paolozzi’s continuing international success explore the interface between humans and machines.
“Sparked by a strong interest in science and technology, they emerged from his quest for a new formal idiom and iconography to reflect mass industrial society.
“He challenged aesthetic conventions of his day by applying innovative artistic techniques such as silkscreen and sampling to printing and sculpture.”
Stefanie Heckmann, curator of the Berlinische Galerie’s exhibition Eduardo Paolozzi: Lots of Pictures — Lots of Fun, said: “He was one of the most innovative and irreverent artists of British post-war modernism.”
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