15 januari 2016

Eduardo Paolozzi #3












Eduardo Paolozzi’s recreated studio at Paul Smith’s Mayfair store, 2015.

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Eduardo Paolozzi’s daughter Emma has recreated his studio in a new exhibition at Paul Smith’s Mayfair store. Combining unseen sculptures, sketches and commissioned work alongside family photos and personal items, it offers a fascinating glimpse of the iconic artist’s processes and passion for creating...
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The display is a recreation of Paolozzi’s studio with some personal touches curated by his daughter.
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“Paul [Smith] asked me to create my interpretation of my father’s studio. At the beginning, we weren’t quite sure where we were going to take it, but we’ve focused on this being his daughter’s collection – half of my flat is in this room,” she adds.

At one end of the room is a pair of glass display cases filled with sketchbooks and personal items owned by Paolozzi – an issue of Private Eye, the beginnings of a photo collage, a Marks & Spencer charge card and a photograph of him having lunch with his talented model maker Ray Watson. His desk, meanwhile, is strewn with paper, scissors, glue and unfinished projects. There’s even a mug for his tea, a copy of the Radio Times (he bought two from the same newsagents every morning, says Emma) and an opened packet of McVities Digestives.

“My father had three studios in his house [in Chelsea] – two were upstairs in the same block and another one was downstairs. His assistants would set up in the ground floor in the morning, and he would potter into one of the other studios for a while, then come back and see what they were up to, then go off again to work on something else. He was always tinkering with something, reevaluating and reassessing. And then he’d stop and read for a while. He was a compulsive reader. He just had this third for anything and everything,” she adds.

Paolozzi’s thirst for knowledge and obsession with collecting is evident throughout the space – it is littered with unusual objects and visual ephemera. On one shelf, Emma points out a metal car bonnet ornament moulded in the shape of a Native American chief, which he found in the US and brought back for his studio. “He would get mildly obsessive about something and start collecting lots of it, or researching it, so suddenly it would be learning everything about car bonnets. He collapsed before computing really took hold but Google would have blown his mind,” she says.

There are also some suitcases stacked on the floor, which Paolozzi would stuff full of materials and take with him wherever he went. “He almost created a kind of travelling studio – he’d fill it with paper, scissors, glue, whatever, so he could literally just work on any surface,” she remembers. “We went to stay with a friend once in the Isle of Man for a long weekend and within hours, his bedroom looked like his studio.”

There’s an air of chaos in the busy shelves and cabinets crammed full of things – a photograph of one of his studios on display reveals a room filled from floor to ceiling with books – but Paolozzi says her father’s workspace wasn’t quite as disorganised as it seemed. “If you came in and asked him for a book on snakes, he’d know exactly where one was. He may have seemed chaotic but he was always incredibly organised in his head … like all successful people, I think, he was totally focused.”

While the Dean Gallery in Scotland also has a permanent recreation of Paolozzi’s studio on display, the installation at Paul Smith offers a more intimate (and a slightly messier) look at his working life.
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Eduardo and Emma Paolozzi outside his Chelsea studio. (bron en foto: Mariana Cook)

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