Sculptor and artist Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was born in Leith on March 7th 1924, the eldest son of Italian immigrants.
In 1943 he studied at the College of Art in Edinburgh in 1944 at the St Martin’s School of Art and finally at the Slade School of Art in Oxford from 1945 to 1947. There he attends to art from outside Europe, which influenced his early works.
Paolozzi was co-founder of the “Independent Group” in London in 1952/53, which discussed thoughts of including trivial culture and that way gave decisive impulses for the development of Pop-Art which he is widely considered to be one of the pioneers.
The people of Edinburgh will know Paolozzi as a sculptor but he also produced graphic art and pottery, made films and was a successful writer, he taught textile design at the Central School of Art and Design in London from 1949 to 1955 and changed to the St. Martin’s School of Art in 1955. He went to Hamburg for two years to teach at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in 1960 and between 1977 and 1981 he held a chair at the Fachhochschule in Cologne. In 1981 he switched to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, where he taught until his retirement in 1994.
Since 1999 the main part of his work and his library as well as a reconstruction of his studio are shown at the Dean Gallery, which belongs to the Scottish National Gallery. Eduardo Paolozzi died in London in April 2005.
Among Paolozzi’s best known works are his works for public places like the design of the tube station Tottenham Court Road in London with coloured mosaics, the realisation of the Rheingarten project in Cologne or the cast iron sculpture ‘Piscator’ for the Euston Square in London.
Eduardo Paolozzi suffered a near fatal stroke in 2001 and spent the last years of his life confined to a wheelchair, he passed away in April 2005 in a hospital in London, he was cremated at West London Crematorium.
