This Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London, features 50 screen-prints and photo-lithographs made between 1965 and 1970 by the pioneering British pop artist, Eduardo Paolozzi. With idiosyncratic titles such as Totems and Taboos of the Nine-to-Five Day; Twenty Traumatic Twinges and Cary Grant as a Male War Bride, these prints fuse the celebrities and ephemera of our modern age with the technologies of mass-reproduction to create exhilarating artworks that fizz with colour and graphic complexity. The novelist, J G Ballard, a friend and sometime collaborator of Paolozzi, described General Dynamic F.U.N. as a ‘unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds’.

Eduardo Paolozzi, An Empire of Silly Statistics… A Fake War for Public Relations, from General Dynamic F.U.N., 1970 © The Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS 2023

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was born in Scotland and is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of pop art, a post-war art movement that took inspiration from popular culture and the mass media. He was a compulsive collector and juggler of images who described himself as ‘a wizard in Toytown’, transforming the mundane and the mass-produced into innovative and distinctive artworks. He is famous for his mechanistic sculptures as well as his kaleidoscopic print projects and created many notable public works, such as the mosaic murals at Tottenham Court Road underground station in London.

Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N. has been organised and funded by the Friends of the Heseltine Gallery.

The exhibition runs from 11 September to 15 October 2023. Open Sunday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, closed Saturdays. Admission free.