Fans of Eduardo Paolozzi’s work would do well to subscribe to Apollo this month. The September issue includes Matthew Sperling’s excellent review of the exhibition ‘Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture’, which is at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 13 October.
While the exhibition continues, new UK subscribers to Apollo will receive a free copy of the accompanying catalogue Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture (worth £24.95) as well as 20% off the cover price of the magazine.
‘Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture’ focuses on the centrality of collage to Paolozzi’s wider artistic practice. Here’s what Matthew Sperling has to say about the artist’s early influences and experiments with the medium:
Paolozzi found his range early. After training at the Slade and the Ruskin, by his early 20s he was producing talented drawings and sculptures in what he called a ‘Picassoid’ vein. From 1947 he spent two formative years in Paris, where he met Léger, Arp, Braque, Brancusi, Balthus, Giacometti and Tzara, and discovered Existentialism. It was on his return to London that he first began to extend the possibilities of Surrealism by incorporating images from popular culture and advertising into his assemblages.
The continuum between popular culture and fine art was not just an aesthetic position for Paolozzi but also a matter of practice. His first teaching post was in the textile department at the Central School of Art and Design, and during the 1950s the all-over compositions of his collages and screenprints, featuring dense assymetrical patterns of organic, man-made, and semi-abstract imagery, were well adapted to fabrics and wallpapers, even being used for fashionable cocktail dresses produced by Horrockses.
In the words of the artist himself:
Making collage can be a symbolic act, like life itself – a tangle unravelled
The full review is available to read in the current issue of Apollo.
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