Three decades before Andy Warhol immortalized the Campbell's Soup can,
Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was crowding childhood scrapbooks with
images of American popular culture he found in old magazines,
newspapers, and comic strips.
Renowned as a founder of the British Pop Art movement, Paolozzi hijacked familiar icons like Mr. Peanut, the Chiquita banana, and Cary Grant in drag as the "Male war Bride" to create visual biographies of modern life. Paolozzi's General Dynamic F.U.N. print series, created between 1965 and 1970, embodies the dizzying eclecticism of the artist's approach in a series of fifty numbered, loose-leaf screenprints and photolithographs boxed in acrylic resin.
The artist conceived of the project as a kind of unbound art book, with the collector or viewer editing and displaying the prints in any order, rather than in a rigid sequence.
General Dy-namic F.U.N. echoes the visual detritus that litters modern life, joining a body of work that Paolozzi called his "metamorphosis of rubbish." The selection exhibited here, drawn from the Tang Museum's permanent collection, distills Paolozzi's central motifs and aesthetic into a provocative essay on the emblems that shape modern culture. In his pioneering use of commercial silkscreen methods, the artist exploited mass reproduction technology to make fine art and simultaneously satirized the exploitation of imagery in our technology-driven culture. Known principally as a sculptor, Paolozzi is represented by public sculpture commissions and work in museum collections throughout Great Britain. He was knighted in 1989.
As the novelist J. G. Ballard noted in his introduction to General Dynamic F.U.N., "Here the familiar materials of our everyday lives, the jostling iconographies of mass advertising and consumer goods, are manipulated to reveal their true identities." Nothing is as it seems and irony abounds. Lady Godiva rides a motorcycle; Christ's image is profaned as a paint-by-number; flesh turns green and lettuce grows blue. Paolozzi reconfigured unrelated images to form a tangle of references and connections, leading viewers in as many directions as there are ideas, images, and products in our modern world.
The Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N. was curated by Michelle Paquette '08 for her Skidmore MALS thesis project. Her exhibition is supported by the Carter-Rodriguez Fund for Student Curatorial Programs. The works are featured at the Tang Museum through August 30, 2009.
The artist conceived of the project as a kind of unbound art book, with the collector or viewer editing and displaying the prints in any order, rather than in a rigid sequence.
General Dy-namic F.U.N. echoes the visual detritus that litters modern life, joining a body of work that Paolozzi called his "metamorphosis of rubbish." The selection exhibited here, drawn from the Tang Museum's permanent collection, distills Paolozzi's central motifs and aesthetic into a provocative essay on the emblems that shape modern culture. In his pioneering use of commercial silkscreen methods, the artist exploited mass reproduction technology to make fine art and simultaneously satirized the exploitation of imagery in our technology-driven culture. Known principally as a sculptor, Paolozzi is represented by public sculpture commissions and work in museum collections throughout Great Britain. He was knighted in 1989.
As the novelist J. G. Ballard noted in his introduction to General Dynamic F.U.N., "Here the familiar materials of our everyday lives, the jostling iconographies of mass advertising and consumer goods, are manipulated to reveal their true identities." Nothing is as it seems and irony abounds. Lady Godiva rides a motorcycle; Christ's image is profaned as a paint-by-number; flesh turns green and lettuce grows blue. Paolozzi reconfigured unrelated images to form a tangle of references and connections, leading viewers in as many directions as there are ideas, images, and products in our modern world.
The Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N. was curated by Michelle Paquette '08 for her Skidmore MALS thesis project. Her exhibition is supported by the Carter-Rodriguez Fund for Student Curatorial Programs. The works are featured at the Tang Museum through August 30, 2009.
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