Alive with Innovations: Paolozzi's Beginnings

The legacy of Leith-born artist Eduardo Paolozzi, an innovator in what our sensibilities now call 'pop-art', is reinvoigorated in the Dean Gallery's latest exhibition. Paolozzi—a man whose intricate collages from media appeared a good decade before Warhol's soup cans—created stylized works without remaining entrenched in a style. His most distinctive work began in the 1970s: creations that appear as objects found in a projected future, which to modern eyes appear to be chipped from the Death Star. This is where the art inevitably loses its message, though it remains visually pleasing and satisfies a 'retro-futurist' aesthetic.

In his final works, Paolozzi seemed more interested in the temporality of his art than his own mortality, producing massive works which sought to correct and unify his career. Underneath a set of his 1970s ceiling panels stands his steel Vulcan, the metalworker to the gods. The artist was consumed by the magic mankind ascribes to mechanically produced objects despite their human origin. His Vulcan is an apotheosis; man's wonder at his own creation forms a god that man forgot he created.

The effect of this colossus is muted by the science fiction indulgence of its placement amongst Paolozzi's futurism; it would better stand among skyscrapers, its own creations, not Paolozzi's. These transgressions are saved by the display of the artist's studio, reconstructed inside the Gallery. A mess of board games and magazines, dissembled typewriters and electric organs, toy robots and anatomical models, it makes obvious Paolozzi's monolithic endeavor to expose the space between the parallel paths of humanity and technology, just as his early works crudely merge the classical form with industrial machinery. It is rare to get such a total glimpse of an artist as the Dean Gallery gives despite a relatively small collection; if the coming of spring wasn't enough reason to visit the Dean Gallery, Paolozzi is.