New exhibition at Art Gallery

The Hayward Touring exhibition ‘Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age’ will visit Beverley Art Gallery from Saturday 18 April until 16 May, and brings together 15 young artists who have created 37 newly commissioned prints in response to the ideas behind Eduardo Paolozzi’s famous BUNK portfolio.

A voracious collector, a ‘jumbler’ of icons and one of the pioneers of Pop Art, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) is equally revered for his mechanistic sculptures and his kaleidoscopic print and collage projects.

The works made by the artists will be shown alongside a selection of Paolozzi’s BUNK prints (1972), which feature collaged images of scientific advancements, planes, motorcars and ammunition merged with food, art and seductive human forms, foreshadowing the fusion of technology and life.

The selected London-based artists are Pio Abad, Marie Angeletti, Helen Carmel Benigson, Gabriele Beveridge, Steve Bishop, Bryan Dooley, Adham Faramawy, Anthea Hamilton, Nicholas Hatfull, Eloise Hawser, Jack Lavender, Harry Meadows, Berry Patten, Peles Empire and Samara Scott.

The artists chosen for this exhibition have exhibited widely around the world and often show large-scale installations, sculpture, video, performance, photography and painting. They are the first ‘native’ generation of internet-users and image up-loaders for whom quick-touch modification is the norm. Their desire to fuse foreign bodies in new, alternative or synthetic landscapes creates a unique, contemporary counterpoint to Paolozzi’s futuristic visions from the past.

Each artist in ‘Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age’ draws upon imagery from popular culture to create works reflecting on the ways in which our bodies respond to technology, and on our social lives within this new cosmology. Some offer up new, surrealistic landscapes, fusing popular icons and images into new vistas, whilst others use iconography from advertising slogans, video games and popular magazines.

It was at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, where Paolozzi first revealed elements of the BUNK collages in a 1952 lecture, often heralded as one of the main precursors to Pop Art in Britain. They were formally shown at the artist’s Tate Gallery retrospective in 1971 before he officially produced the limited edition prints - to be shown in this exhibition - in 1972.

This exhibition has been curated by London-based writer and curator Isobel Harbison.

For more information call Beverley Art Gallery on 01482 392773.