Eduardo Paolozzi’s prints defiantly merge popular culture and modern abstraction. Paolozzi,
whose work was a forerunner to Pop Art and who was a participant in the 1956 exhibit This Is
Tomorrow (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London), often credited as the first Pop Art exhibition,
drew from popular sources verboten in the realms of fine art and high modern abstraction of
his day. His colorful portfolio General Dynamic F.U.N., from which these abstract prints were
selected, also includes an eclectic mix of imagery appropriated from advertisements, as well
as pictures of famous actresses and bodybuilders. In these four pieces, Paolozzi investigates
the geometry of a machine aesthetic and modern urban architecture. Some of the titles
parody the utopian idealism of pre-World War II modern architects and artists. Similar to
Andy Warhol’s screenprints, the purposeful messiness and slight misregistration of some of
Paolozzi’s prints evoke the aesthetic of cheap commercial printing typically used for mass
production of pop culture.
–When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction From The University At Albany Art Collections (1967-Present)