Eduardo Paolozzi 1924-2005

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi was a British sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer.

Born of Italian parents in Scotland, he attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with a view to becoming a commercial artist. After brief military service, in 1944 he attended St Martin's School of Art in London, and from 1945 to 1947 he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art before moving to Paris. While working in Paris from 1947 to 1949, Paolozzi became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque and Constantin Brancusi who strongly influenced his later work.

In the late 1940s he made several sculptures inspired by Surrealism, and also produced a number of collages, which blend the incongruous juxtapositions of Surrealism with Paolozzi's interest in images of modern machinery.

From 1949 to 1955 Paolozzi taught at the Central School of Art and Design in London. During this time in 1952 he founded The Independent Group alongside artists including sculptor Richard Hamilon and photographer Nigel Henderson. In 1956 they held the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London which included an innovative series of immersive installations. The Independent Group is widely regarded as the precursor to the 1950's Pop Art movements in Britain and America through their use of popular culture and found objects, with Paolozzi being viewed as a leading pioneer.

In his own work of the 1950s he concentrated on the human form, representing it as brutalised and anguished. In his sculptures he incorporated impressions made by machines and other metal parts into the wax maquettes, which were then cast in bronze. In the 1960s Paolozzi created screenprints drawing on contemporary culture and machine imagery and also developed a new large-scale sculptural practice involving industrial processes to create anthropomorphic shapes using bronze, steel and later aluminium.

During the 1970s Paolozzi experimented with wood in a number of abstract relief works using an intricate network of geometric and biomorphic elements. He was appointed a CBE in 1968 and elected a Royal Academician in 1979.

Paolozzi's work was included in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1960) and he has had major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1964) and Tate Gallery, London (1971) along with a large retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (1984).

Paolozzi is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including Deutsche Bank, and formerly that of David Bowie.