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Framed screen print on Saunders Plain mould made special printing paper
Paper 37 x 24 in/38 x 25.5 x 5 cm
Wood frame with inlay 48.5 x 35.5 x 2 in. / 123 x 90 cm with 1 in. moulding
Signed by the artist and numbered APII lower right in pencil. Edition 75. Printed at Kelpra Studio and published by Editions Alecto.
This mesmerizing Pop art screen print by Eduardo Paolozzi is printed in tangerine orange, pink, yellow, deep red, black and lapis blue, circles and squares framed with a shimmering filigree of gold ink. Eduardo Paolozzi produced this work after travelling to California, where he toured popular destinations such as Disneyland and Paramount Studios and visited centers of technology: the GM assembly plant, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and Stanford’s Linear Accelerator. His visit only deepened the artist’s interest in electronic technology and computing. For Paolozzi, screen printing was a means of exploring iterative imagery – and even imagining the future possibilities of computer-generated images. One can see the influence of a California sunset in Paolozzi’s gilded, vibrant color palette.
At the base of the image, text in tan reads: “The theory of relativity, may certainly be a true description of the facts concerned, even though the theory a theory which took such liberties fully, with the help of what is nothing but a host of metaphors taken from the languages of physics, of biology, and of social life, works out / their categorical structure, and only recasts what has formed concentric circles, surrounded by smaller orbs of the same space; then again a vertical band filled with horizontal strokes; and lastly, two vertical bands of concentric circles”. Here, Paolozzi reimagines Albert Einstein’s 1911 Theory of Relativity — the flattening of time and space — as a formal language of shapes, in which lines represent the movement of space, and circles, their manipulation by time.
Paolozzi made a number of screen prints at Kelpra Studio, London, working closely with Chris Prater, an exceptionally gifted printer with whom a number of British artists collaborated in this period.
Professor Michael Fourman at The University of Edinburgh, wrote:
“Paolozzi was intrigued by genius and creativity. His heroes, Leonardo, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Turing sought to explore the inner workings of the mind, the body and the world.” Einstein was a sort of muse to Paolozzi, serving as the subject of numerous portraits, as well as works such as this one which were inspired by his writings.
