Exhibition of work by Eduardo Paolozzi.

Pop Art pioneer Sir Eduardo Paolozzi once referred to himself as “a wizard in Toytown”, transforming the mundane, the derelict and the mass-produced into what he described as ‘surrealist’ art. 

This Worcester City Art Gallery exhibition focuses on a series of 50 screenprints and photolithographs created by the Edinburgh-born artist between 1965 and 1970. Described by Paolozzi’s friend and collaborator, JG Ballard, as “a unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds”, General Dynamic F.U.N. 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 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.