In 1947, while he was still a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Paolozzi had his first solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, London, and with the proceeds from sales he left for Paris in July of the same year. Over the next two years based in Paris he collected a vast amount of valuable source material for developing his ideas in collage. Much of the material was culled from American magazines given to him by ex-GIs who had stayed on in Paris after the war. The glossy colour imagery of a world of American consumerism seemed light years away from the drabness of post-war austerity in Britain, and the resulting collages made in the late 1940s and back in London in the 1950s, though rooted in Surrealism, are now recognised as forerunners to Pop Art, a movement Paolozzi’s name was to be closely associated with a decade later. The images in this work are from Timemagazine covers and provided a starting point for the dissected head motif which remained a major preoccupation throughout the artist’s career.

Eduardo Paolozzi Artificial Horizons and Eccentric Ladders Works on Paper 1946-1995, The British Council 1996