Paolozzi at 80
Until October 31; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

Edinburgh locals are forever wandering past Edinburgh Castle without noticing it, never mind visiting it. But if one day the Castle disappeared, they would go into a blind funk. It’s the same with Eduardo Paolozzi – people are used to his chunky foot at the top of Leith Walk, and to his mix and match body parts at South Gyle. The Dean Gallery’s ever-changing displays of his work are largely unremarked upon, but it’s comforting to know that they’re there.

Now that the gallery is hosting a big retrospective exhibition of the Leith-born artist’s work, it’s time to sit up and pay attention. After absorbing five rooms of Paolozzi’s work, spanning six decades, you start to notice things you normally walk past: the artist’s collection of plasters sited next to the gallery’s café, the Cleish Castle panels fixed to the ceiling, and the bronze Master of the Universe on the lawn outside.

Perhaps taking her lead from Paolozzi’s own pick-and-mix approach to art and exhibitions, the curator has not provided introductory wall texts. Instead each work is individually described in labels which are packed with interesting information. The rooms are divided up chronologically, leaving the clear development of Paolozzi’s style to speak for itself. From crusty brown brutalism he moves to glossy, colourful structures and patterns, discovering deconstruction along the way.

The gallery owns a sprawling archive of Paolozzi material, including thousands of objects and images either made, or collected, by the artist. Many of his books and photographs are shown, and there seems to have been no need to borrow anything from outwith the collection. Perhaps this explains why Paolozzi’s models for his many public sculptures are not accompanied by photographs of the finished works, an omission which does reduce the impact of the exhibition.

The strongest message of the show is that Paolozzi applied his ideas and methods equally to paper, fabric, wood, tile and metal. He had such insight into the principles of collage that he could make it work in any medium. His collaged screenprint, Standing Figure, is a two-dimensional counterpart of the sculptures around it. The print combines crudely drawn lines with cut-out mechanical diagrams, forming a squat, brutish modern monster.

Standing around it are encrusted bronze creatures whose roughly modelled bodies have been stamped with impressions of circuitry and engine parts. In later decades his bronzes would become a jumble of human and robot parts like those at the top of Leith Walk. You get a rare glimpse of Paolozzi’s early fascination with this idea in a small collage of 1946, in which the young student enhanced the body of a classical female figure with a cut out mechanical diagram.

Paolozzi was among the first to use collage to combine high art with popular imagery, finding new meaning in the gaps between these unlikely combinations. This, many claim, makes him the Father of Pop Art. It also makes his work incredibly refreshing. While it’s easy to date, by virtue of the scraps torn from fashion magazines and ephemera of the time, it seems to blast through fashion to a place beyond its reach. That place is the home of a purely creative mind, uncorrupted by visual or intellectual snobbery, and inspired by everything it sees.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.06.04