Exhibition: Eduardo Paolozzi – General Dynamic F.U.N.
A Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London
Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum
Saturday 11 January – Sunday 30 March 2025
A new Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition of screen prints by Eduardo Paolozzi is set to open at Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum as part of a nationwide tour.
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was a trailblazer of the pop art movement in Britain. Born in Scotland, Paolozzi was an obsessive collector and a collagist of cultural icons. He is celebrated both for his mechanistic sculptures and his vibrant, kaleidoscopic print projects. The artist, who described himself as “a wizard in Toytown,” transformed the everyday, the discarded, and the mass-produced into images charged with electric eclecticism and admired for their graphic intricacy. “Carrots into pomegranates!”
Paolozzi’s ingenious alchemy is on full display in General Dynamic F.U.N., a series of fifty screen prints and photolithographs produced between 1965 and 1970. In this collection, Paolozzi harnesses the technologies of mass reproduction and revels in its idols – the household names and recognisable faces of consumer advertising, haute couture, and Hollywood. The artist’s friend and occasional collaborator, J.G. Ballard, described General Dynamic F.U.N. as a “unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds.”
The prints, which bear whimsical titles such as Totems and Taboos of the Nine-to-Five Day, Twenty Traumatic Twinges, and Cary Grant as a Male War Bride, are not arranged in a fixed order and can be viewed in any sequence. For Paolozzi, the modern era, revealed as fleeting and disposable, is inherently a fragmented clash of visual stimuli and influences. His work serves as a “health warning for an uncreative and wasteful society.”
Visitors to the exhibition at Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum should note that there is no lift access to the first floor due to ongoing work to upgrade the lift. This forms part of an exciting three-year programme to enhance facilities for all visitors.
For more information please see www.museumsworcestershire.org.uk