Sir Eduardo Paolozzi,CBE, RA, (1 March 1924 - 22 April 2005) was one of Scotland's most inventive and prolific artists of the 20th Century. Born in Leith, Edinburgh, Paolozzi studied at Edinburgh College of Art and The Slade School of Art, London. Paolozzi's works, in part influenced by Dada and Surrealism, often featured collaged pictorial subjects drawn from film, magazines and commercial packaging. After 1973 his use of mass media imagery was replaced by more abstract iconography inspired by the graphic notation of sound, and later by the work of the mathematician and wartime code-breaker Alan Turing. Paolozzi's innovative use of collage translates well onto screenprint, which readily retains the collage-like effect within a larger-scale graphic work. Paolozzi was a master of the screenprinting technique and used it to create many of his most famous and memorable prints of the 1960s. These collage-based silkscreened images are among the finest examples of Pop Art, a style that he was instrumental in shaping.
In 2010 the Glasgow Print Studio exhibited a range of his screenprints from 1967-2005, in addition to four etchings produced at the studio workshop in 1990. In the etchings entitled “Landscape” I-IV. Paolozzi took torn fragments of his original prints and drawings and pieced them back together to produce new compositions. Pen and ink were applied over the top, developing them into new images in their own right. This technique of ripping works apart and piecing them back together again is also conveyed in his sculpture.
