Eduardo
Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi (b. 1924 in Edinburgh; d. 2005 in London) was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in 1974. Along with Richard Hamilton, Paolozzi is considered to be one of the founders of British Pop art. From 1947 onward he exhibited in London and Paris (where he visited Alberto Giacometti in his studio); he also held teaching posts for textile design, and later for ceramics, at art colleges in London. Paolozzi became known above all for collages and sculptures that were inspired by mechanical drawings, natural history, Surrealism, and Futurism, as well as for his designs for public monuments. Paolozzi was given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964, and participated in groundbreaking exhibitions such as This is Tomorrow, which took place in 1956 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. He also founded the Krazy Kat Arkive at St Andrews University, an archive of twentieth-century popular culture ephemera that comprises some 20,000 printed items and objects, and is now held at the Blythe House Archive & Library Study Room, London.

Between April and June during his time in Berlin, Paolozzi not only gave legendary dinners but also mounted an exhibition in his large (300 m²) studio, which was in a former factory building in a back courtyard on Kottbusser Damm. In this studio he produced a large number of new prints and models for sculptures and reliefs, including the bronze reliefs Kreuzberg I and II (1974/75), which are now displayed in the park of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

In early 1975, a major exhibition of Paolozzi’s collages, prints, and sculptures that originated at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover was presented at the Neue Nationalgalerie and Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. The exhibition and the comprehensive catalogue that accompanied it were realized in collaboration with the Artists-in-Berlin Program. Many of Paolozzi’s works subsequently entered the collections of Berlin institutions. Although he generously offered to gift the city of Berlin a public sculpture, asking only for his production costs to be reimbursed, the Berlin Senate turned it down due to the city’s poor financial situation. In 1976 Paolozzi won a competition sponsored by the city of Berlin to paint a mural on the side of a building at Kurfürstenstrasse 87, which housed the Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Statistical Office). The large-format, abstract mural was completed in January 1977, but was covered up when a bank office building was constructed on the adjacent plot in 1983. In 2018 the mural briefly came to light again when the bank was demolished, but disappeared from view again when a new building was put up in its place.

In conjunction with the exhibition Eduardo Paolozzi – Druckgrafik 1974 bis 1982, which was shown at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1984, the Artists-in-Berlin Program published a catalogue that above all featured three graphic series on musical themes that Paolozzi had created in Berlin: The Ravel Suite (1974, six photogravure etchings); Kottbusser Damm Pictures and Turkish Music (1974, four screenprints), and Calcium Light Night (1974–76, nine screenprints dedicated to the composer Charles Ives), as well as his designs for the Berlin mural.

Paolozzi participated in the 26th and 27th Venice Biennale (1952 and 1954), the 4th Bienal de São Paulo (1957), as well as documenta 2, 3, and 4 (1959, 1964, and 1968). In 2018 the Berlinische Galerie presented Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun, a major retrospective that originated at the Whitechapel Gallery; the show in Berlin focused on Paolozzi’s early work and above all on the time he spent in this city.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd