Eduardo Paolozzi – General Dynamic F.U.N.
The Ropewalk gallery in Barton on Humber is hosting a new Hayward Touring exhibition of screen-prints by Eduardo Paolozzi as part of a national tour.
General Dynamic F.U.N. which opens on Saturday, September 10, is a series of 50 screen-prints and photolithographs which were created between 1965 and 1970.
Here Paolozzi employs the technologies of mass-reproduction and gorges on its idols – the household names and familiar faces of consumer advertising, high fashion and Hollywood.
The artist’s friend and sometime collaborator, J.G. Ballard, described General Dynamic F.U.N as a ‘unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’.
The Ropewalk’s Exhibition’s Officer, Richard Hatfield, said Paolozzi, who died in 2005, was equally revered for his mechanistic sculptures and his kaleidoscope print projects.
“It’s not surprising that he described himself as ‘a wizard in Toytown’ as he transformed the mundane, the derelict and the mass produced into images that zap with electric eclecticism and impress with their graphic complexity,” he went on.
The prints bear idiosyncratic titles such as Totems and Taboos of the Nine-to-Five Day, Twenty Traumatic Twinges and Cary Grant as a Male War Bride.
“For Paolozzi, the modern age, exposed as ephemera, is a necessarily fragmented collision of visual stimulus and influence, and his work is a ‘health warning for an uncreative and thriftless society’”, Richard went on.
This Hayward Touring exhibition from Southbank Centre, London, is on behalf of Arts Council England.
The exhibition is open daily until Sunday October 9 and admission is free. The Ropewalk is open from Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm and on Sundays and Bank Holidays from 10am to 4pm.