Eduardo Paolozzi

Hanover Gallery, London
Probably acquired from the above by the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 25th May 1959 for £200
Gifted by Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Hokin to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1965

London, Hanover Gallery, Paolozzi Sculpture, 11th November - 31st December 1958, cat. no.16, illustrated.

Dirt and surface deposits have gathered in some of the crevices otherwise the work appears in good original condition. Please contact the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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In 1955, Paolozzi took up a post teaching sculpture at St.Martin's School of Art and during the next six years he developed a new sculptural manner, creating often monumental pieces which incorporated his fascination with 'found' objects.

The method by which these sculptures were produced was a crucial element in both their physical appearance and their relationship to the work of other artists of the time. The objects (which could be as diverse as bark, model cars, clock parts, gramophone components and a dismantled ex-RAF bomb sight) were initially pressed into clay to form a negative relief, from which wax moulds were taken. These wax positives were then twisted, torn and fastened together and finally cast by the lost-wax technique as unique bronzes. This unorthodox method of working was important for Paolozzi as it allowed him to combine his sculptural ideas with the collaged forms he had been working with previously and transform them into a solid three-dimensional object.

Whilst his work of this period is often associated with the sculpture of his British contemporaries, such as Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler and Kenneth Armitage, the pieces often seem to have more in common with European artists, perhaps the most obvious parallel being that of Jean Dubuffet. Paolozzi had been exposed to the older artist's work in Paris and it had also been recently seen in London at a 1955 ICA exhibition. Dubuffet's heavily worked surfaces and scarred iconic imagery also made full use of collage and unusual non-art materials and Paolozzi seems to have responded well to this. In particular, these naïve and ungainly bronze figures do seem to echo the simplicity of Art Brut. However, Paolozzi seems to have been most interested in the transformations that took place in the objects he used. Having described the process by which the sculptures were made, he then described them thus:

'This is what imposes, in addition to a formal metamorphosis, a material metamorphosis on all my materials. In the finished casting the original objets trouvés are no longer present at all, as they are in the Dada and Surrealist compositions of this kind. They survive in my sculptures as ghosts of forms that still haunt the bronze, details of its surface or its actual structure' (E.Roditi, Dialogues on Art, London, 1960, p.162).

There are three, possibly four versions of  this subject, which were all cast separately and are all unique, the present work being almost certainly the third of these. The first version of the subject, also unique, was exhibited at the Hanover Gallery, Contemporary Sculpture, July-September 1956, cat. no.48; and the second unique version was lent to the exhibition, Architects' Choice, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 28th  October - 29th November 1959, cat. no.39.

We are grateful to Robin Spencer for his kind assistance in cataloguing the present work.