In the 1950s, Paolozzi cofounded the Independent Group, a band of London artists, architects, and critics who coined the term "Pop art" and were its earliest practitioners. As a member of the group, Paolozzi made sculptures, prints, and even films that explored the language of an increasingly mechanized, technology-obsessed society. Universal Electronic Vacuum is a series of ten collages created as templates for a series of prints. Composed of bits of paper cut from screenprints made by the artist using high-concentrate dyes, the majority of these works have motifs that read horizontally across the sheet, as if they were a dot-matrix computer printout, although each has a unique composition and was made by hand.
Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017.
