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)