Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N
Wake up your eyes with 48 works by Pop Art pioneer Paolozzi
Saturday 14 March to Sunday 7 June
Free entry
Eduardo Paolozzi
General Dynamic F.U.N.
A Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London
Usher Gallery
A new Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition of screen-prints by Eduardo Paolozzi will open at the Usher Gallery as part of a national tour.
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) was one of the pioneers of the pop art movement in the UK. Born in Scotland, Paolozzi was a compulsive collector and a jumbler of icons. He is equally revered for his mechanistic sculptures and his kaleidoscopic print projects. The artist, who described himself as 'a wizard in Toytown', transformed the mundane, the derelict and the mass-produced into images that zap with electric eclecticism and impress with their graphic complexity. 'Carrots into pomegranates!'
Paolozzi's canny alchemy is vividly apparent in General Dynamic F.U.N, a series of fifty screenprints and photolithographs created between 1965 and 1970. Here Paolozzi 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 artist's friend and sometime collaborator, J.G. Ballard, described General Dynamic F.U.N as a 'unique guidebook to the electric garden of our minds'.
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'.
Image:Eduardo Paolozzi, Totems and Taboos of the Nine-to-Five Day from General Dynamic F.U.N., 1970 © 2026 The Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS.
Event programme:
Opening Celebration and Performance
Friday 17 April, 6-8pm
Free to attend
Gelliprinting for families
13 April 2026
Lino Printing for families workshop
18 April 2026
Screenprinting for Families
28 May 2026
Screenprinting for Adults
30 May 2026
Gelliprinting For Adults
1 June 2026