Eduardo Paolozzi’s Untitled reflects a shift in his sculpture practice that occurred in the early 1960s, when he moved away from the rough and jagged forms of his earlier work, and began casting in brass. The smooth gleam of these polished, shiny surfaces recall the metal figurines that decorate car bonnets, or the beauty of the precision of mechanistic components and forms that so appealed to Paolozzi. Untitled retains a sense of the totem-like objects of his earlier work, yet there is also a feeling that what is being revered is a love of the machine, echoing the ‘white heat of technology’, described in Harold Wilson’s new industrial policy of early 1960s Britain.
In 2017,
Untitled was included as part of a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, featuring works in a range of media and providing a survey of Paolozzi’s artistic production across a 50-year period.
