For our first event in 2019, we will explore the two parallel displays of work by Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi.
The exhibition shows the evolution of their art, revealing similarities as well as differences from their interest in popular culture and mass consumerisation to new technologies and the discovery of screen printing in the 1960s. The exhibition also reunites them as in 1968, Warhol and Paolozzi exhibited together as part of a five-person show at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.
The title of the exhibition comes from a quote by Andy Warhol when he discovered screen printing which enabled him to make works of art which almost made themselves. ‘That’s what I like, he [Warhol] famously said. I want to be a machine.’
Both artists captured images from photography and advertisements. Warhol traced his images while Paolozzi used collage until they both turned to screen printing to transform photographs into prints.
The exhibition includes rarely seen drawings by Warhol, as well as his famous prints of Marilyn Munroe. Works by Paolozzi include some of his early proto-Pop collages from the early 1950s and Metallization of a Dream in 1963 and key works from the famous 1952 Bunk lecture where he is credited with kick-starting Pop Art.
We will be joined by Dr Glyn Davis, Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Edinburgh to discuss the work of these icons of modern art.
