25 Facts About Eduardo Paolozzi

Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was a Scottish artist, known for his sculpture and graphic works.

Eduardo Paolozzi is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of pop art.

Eduardo Paolozzi was born on 7 March 1924, in Leith in north Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the eldest son of Italian immigrants.

Eduardo Paolozzi's family was from Viticuso, in the Lazio region.

Eduardo Paolozzi used to spend all his summers at his grandparents place in Monte Cassino and grew up bilingual.

Eduardo Paolozzi studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1943, briefly at Saint Martin's School of Art in 1944, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London from 1944 to 1947, after which he worked in Paris.

Eduardo Paolozzi was interested in everything and would use a variety of objects and materials in his work, particularly his collages.

Eduardo Paolozzi came to public attention in the 1950s by producing a range of striking screenprints and Art brut sculpture.

Eduardo Paolozzi was a founder of the Independent Group in 1952, which is regarded as the precursor to the mid-1950s British and late 1950s American Pop Art movements.

Eduardo Paolozzi's seminal 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything is considered the earliest standard bearer representing Pop Art.

Eduardo Paolozzi always described his work as surrealist art and, while working in a wide range of media though his career, became more closely associated with sculpture.

Eduardo Paolozzi is recognized for producing largely lifelike statuary works, but with rectilinear elements added or removed, or the human form deconstructed in a cubist manner.

Eduardo Paolozzi taught sculpture and ceramics at several institutions, including the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste Hamburg, University of California, Berkeley and at the Royal College of Art.

Eduardo Paolozzi had a long association with Germany, having worked in Berlin from 1974 as part of the Berlin Artist Programme of the German Academic Exchange Programme.

Eduardo Paolozzi was a professor at the Fachhochschule in Cologne from 1977 to 1981, and later taught sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich.

Eduardo Paolozzi was fond of Munich and many of his works and concept plans were developed in a studio he kept there, including the mosaics of the Tottenham Court Road Station in London.

Eduardo Paolozzi took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Paolozzi decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.

Eduardo Paolozzi was appointed CBE in 1968 and in 1979 he was elected to the Royal Academy.

Eduardo Paolozzi was promoted to the office of Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1986, which he held until his death.

Eduardo Paolozzi received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1987.

Eduardo Paolozzi was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1989 as Knight Bachelor.

In 1994, Eduardo Paolozzi gave the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art a large body of his works, and much of the content of his studio.

In 2001, Eduardo Paolozzi suffered a near-fatal stroke, causing an incorrect magazine report that he had died.

In 2013, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester held a major retrospective Eduardo Paolozzi: Collaging Culture, featuring more than 100 of the artist's works, including sculpture, drawings, textile, film, ceramics and paper collage.

Pallant House Gallery has an extensive collection of Eduardo Paolozzi's work given and loaned by the architect Colin St John Wilson, who commissioned Eduardo Paolozzi's sculpture Newton After Blake for the British Library.