The Paolozzi connection

I must admit that there are quite a few sections of the collections preserved in Scottish museums that I don’t really like.

For example Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art appears to be an empty shell rather than a proper gallery. Yes, you don’t necessarily need to cram too many artworks in one space, but what’s the point of having just a few boring pieces scattered on three floors?

There is one artist, though, I learnt to love after seeing his works in Scottish museums and galleries, Eduardo Paolozzi.

His mosaics for Tottenham Court Road Station were one of the first things that mesmerised me when I visited London as a teenager, but I became more familiar with Paolozzi after a research I did a few years ago on the Arandora Star survivors.

Born in March 1924, in Leith, in the north Edinburgh, Paolozzi was the eldest son of Italian immigrants.

He was interned in prison like most Italian men in Britain in 1940, while his father, grandfather and uncle were among the 446 Italians who drowned when the Arandora Star, a ship deporting Italians to Canada, was sunk by a German U-boat.

As a young man Paolozzi enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art, and, from 1944 until 1947 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London.

Moving to Paris, he became acquainted with other artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger.

Later on he went back to the UK and became well-known for his sculptures, drawings, screenprints, textiles, ceramics and jewellery.

His iconic collage-like images evoke Pop Art atmospheres (he was after all a founding member of the Pop Art movement in the UK), while his collages and prints such as Calcium Light Night: Central Park in the Dark some 40 Years Ago (1974), are characterised by bold yet clean lines forming abstract motifs.

I quite like also Paolozzi’s metal sculptures that could be used as sets for a Metropolis-style film about a dystopic future.

Scottish designer Holly Fulton recently filtered Eduardo Paolozzi’s philosophy, motifs, lines and study of the connection between organisms and machines through her own trademark robotic and rigid designs.

In her Spring/Summer 2010 collection – inspired by the Scots-Italian artist, robots and Art Deco – Fulton included black prints that called to mind the lines, swirls and circles of Paolozzi’s Calcium Light Night series, and dresses characterised by rigid silhouettes decorated with prints or sequinned motifs of towers that echoed in their colours Paolozzi’s prefabricated aluminium sculpture Four Towers (1962).

Paolozzi’s study of the coarse appearances of surfaces was rediscovered by the designer in her use of sequins and appliquéd motifs and in her geometric necklaces, but the skyscrapers that appeared on her designs also echoed the fascination Art Deco had with such buildings.

The Art Deco movement was indeed tied to the city and some critics talk of “skyscraper style” when analysing the urban sophistication of office towers, hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings from those times.

Fulton printed on skirts and shirts the ziggurat shaped top of skyscrapers and, in some cases, Fulton's buildings looked like crossovers between Paolozzi’s sculptures, the bas-relief from the Hotel St. George, Brooklyn, with its buildings characterised by rigid yet futuristic silhouettes, and the “Zigzag Moderne” rocket-shaped pyramidal terraced towers of The Portals of the Pacific at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco Bay.

Fulton’s geometrical patterns and bright colours and the materials she employed in her necklaces also call to mind the main materials employed by Art Deco artists, such as enamel, chrome, glass, and plastic.

You will obviously have to wait until Spring next year to see Fulton's designs in the shops, in the meantime you can check out - from 21st October until 13th November - Paolozzi's screenprints from 1967 until the year 2000 at the London-based Sims Reed Gallery.

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