A Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London
Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum
Saturday 11 January – Sunday 30 March 2025
A new Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition of screen-prints by Eduardo Paolozzi will open at Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum as part of a national tour.
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was one of the pioneers of the pop art movement in the UK. Born in Scotland, Paolozzi was a compulsive collector and a jumbler of icons. He is equally revered for his mechanistic sculptures and his kaleidoscopic print projects. The artist, who described himself as ‘a wizard in Toytown’, transformed the mundane, the derelict and the mass-produced into images that zap with electric eclecticism and impress with their graphic complexity. ‘Carrots into pomegranates!’
Paolozzi’s canny alchemy is vividly apparent in General Dynamic F.U.N, a series of fifty screenprints and photolithographs created between 1965 and 1970. Here Paolozzi employs the technologies of mass-reproduction and gorges on its idols – the household names and familiar faces of consumer advertising, high fashion and Hollywood. The artist’s friend and sometime collaborator, J.G. Ballard, described General Dynamic F.U.N as a ‘unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’.
The prints, which bear idiosyncratic titles such as Totems and Taboos of the Nine-to-Five Day; Twenty Traumatic Twinges and Cary Grant as a Male War Bride, do not occupy a rigid sequence but can be assembled and viewed in any order. For Paolozzi, the modern age, exposed as ephemera, is a necessarily fragmented collision of visual stimulus and influence, and his work is a ‘health warning for an uncreative and thriftless society’.
Visitors to the exhibition at Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum should be aware that there will be no lift access to the first floor due to work currently taking place to upgrade the lift. This is part of exciting developments over the next three years to improve facilities for all visitors. For more information please see www.museumsworcestershire.org.uk
ENDS
Notes to editors
Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum
Foregate Street
Worcester WR1 1DT
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 4pm, Sunday 10am – 3pm
Free entry.
Image caption: Eduardo Paolozzi, An Empire of Silly Statistics… A Fake War for Public Relations, from General Dynamic F.U.N., 1970 © The Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation/DACS London.
For further information or to arrange a photocall and/or interviews please contact Helen.Large@worcester.gov.uk
For information on the work taking place to improve the visitor experience please see Improvements to Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum 2024 to 2027
About Hayward Gallery Touring
Hayward Gallery Touring is the UK’s largest and longest-standing not for profit organisation producing exhibitions of modern and contemporary art that tour to galleries, museums and other publicly funded venues throughout Britain. Funded by Arts Council England and based at the Southbank Centre, London, Hayward Gallery Touring collaborates with independent curators, artists, writers and galleries to create ambitious exhibitions that are beyond the scope of a single institution. Ranging in scale from the British Art Show – the largest exhibition of contemporary art produced in the UK – to smaller monographic shows, our imaginative exhibitions are seen by up to half a million people in over 40 cities and towns each year.
About Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre and one of the UK’s top five visitor attractions, occupying a prominent riverside location that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. We want to take people out of the everyday, every day. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. For further information please visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk.