Eduardo Paolozzi

As a member of the Independent Group, Scottish-Italian artist Eduardo Paolozzi (*1924 Leith, GB; †2005 London, GB) led the way for the pop art movement in England. His heterogeneous body of work, which began with collages incorporating references to mass culture and includes an album cover and the entrance to a London Underground station, has a very clear central theme: making art part of daily life. Paolozzi achieves this by borrowing from other styles such as surrealism and "art brut" and developing an affinity for technology, which increasingly dominates everyday social life. The public sculptures he started creating in the early 1960s engage with this trend, and comprise multiple modules reminiscent of machine parts, industrially manufactured from precast moulds. In "Camera" (1978/79), a typical piece from this era, the open arrangement of the individual elements provides a space equally suited to relaxation and play. When looked at from above, the hard edges blur and the modules melt into an amorphous structure that nestles among the vegetation. Designed as a climber for children to play on and to be viewed from an aerial perspective, Paolozzi's "Camera" is the perfect balance between an articulate and coherent sculpture and a democratic piece of art that welcomes contact.

Scottish-Italian artist Eduardo Paolozzi (*1924 Leith, GB; †2005 London, GB) looks for inspiration to mass media – the last place anyone would expect to find art – while striving to create art that enriches the everyday life of the masses. As an artist, Paolozzi led the way for the pop art movement in England, creating a diverse oeuvre that ranged from album covers and the entrance to a London Underground station to cast iron sculptures as public art designed for play in outdoor spaces. Because the creative process behind the piece entitled "For Leonardo" is known to us, we can trace how print media can inspire a work of public urban art: Paolozzi spots an illustration by Davis Meltzer in a 1984 article on biogenetics in National Geographic. Meltzer's drawing is a simplified representation of the fight between healthy cells and tumour cells to help the reader understand processes normally only seen under a microscope. For his illustration, he adopts a stylised technical language, depicting the human cells as multi-sided machine parts and the tumour cells as spiky balls biting into the healthy cells. Paolozzi appropriates this design principle and incorporates it into his sculpture, which comprises two hemispheres protruding from within a formation of identical, multi-sided elements. With a nod to the illustration and biogenetic processes that inspired his sculpture, Paolozzi names it "For Leonardo" in an arch reference to the anatomical studies of Leonardo Da Vinci (*1452 Anchiano, IT; †1519 Amboise, FR).