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ANDY WARHOL AND EDUARDO PAOLOZZI: I WANT TO BE A MACHINE Joint exhibition proves more than just a trawl through the greatest hits
Between them, the pop artists Warhol and Paolozzi have to be two of the most widely exhibited artists in the city of Edinburgh, and the need for a retrospective for either doesn’t feel urgently pressing. Yet it remains pleasing to see Paolozzi’s work in the city of his birth no matter what, and it’s in the smart curation of this exhibition that it really becomes something more than a trawl through the greatest hits. Both were not just transatlantic contemporaries working in the field of pop art, but they each had similar fascinations which drew upon their take on art as a potential product of mechanical mass consumption.
With the upstairs galleries divided into two halves, each contains
a mini-retrospective of the respective artist, with an impressive amount of their works on display and a particular focus on these mechanistic qualities they bore. Warhol, who declared that he wanted to be a machine himself
in 1963, in relation to the anonymous and mass-productive capabilities of screenprinting, is represented by a room of earlier work which demonstrates his commercial jobs – including record sleeve design and book cover creation – alongside his more traditional, Truman Capote-influenced first exhibition and experiments with abstract stencilling. The second room is where the Warhol as we know him exists, with his famously multiple- screenprinted image of Marilyn Monroe’s face.
With Paolozzi, meanwhile, we also have a room of his early drawings, taking the form of almost mathematical diagrams, collages snipped from magazine adverts, and bronze sculptures; while next door his larger bronzes and ephemera such as drawings to accompany his 1971 film Mr. Machine – itself a reference to a childhood game of the same name – reintroduce him as a futurist of his day. There is a wealth of creative history to bite into here, and yet it only scratches the surface of both artists’ era-defining output. (David Pollock) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, Edinburgh, until Sun 2 Jun. ●●●●●
1 Feb–31 Mar 2019 THE LIST 99
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