Eduardo Paolozzi

The son of Italian immigrants who settled in Scotland, in the mid-1940s Paolozzi anticipated what would later become Pop art. In 1952, he became a founding member of the Independent Group, which would prove to be Pop’s immediate forerunner. In his collages he incorporated popular books, comics, stickers, postcards, magazine ads and anything he could find to form a social portrait of the Europe of his time. Between 1965 and 1970, he produced two series of screenprints entitled Moonstrips Empire News and General Dynamic F.U.N., bringing together art, graphic design, technology and mass culture. While the former is indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on the relationship between image and word, the latter, centred more on images, was described by friend and writer JG Ballard as ‘a unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’.