Wednesday 18 June 2014

Experience


Experience is the third print in the As Is When suite.
In her book, Eduardo Paolozzi, Diane Kirkpatrick says of Experience:

What is the artist’s subject? ‘The world is all that is the case’.  ‘The structure of the proposition “depicts a possible combination of elements in reality . . .”’  ‘All experience is the world and does not need the subject’. In the print, the visual pattern is a series of horizontal strips, each filled with an intricate and richly varied collection of pattern fragments. The patterns appear to blend, shift and even oscillate backward and forward in space.  They might be visible thoughts, symbols for experience unlimited by a finite physical subject. 

Diane refers to the viewer not simply perceiving a visual image, but undergoing a distinct, physical experience, (like, for instance, an electric shock), triggered by the work – something I have encountered most markedly by standing in front of one of Bridget Riley’s very large paintings. 

Paolozzi used elements from Artificial Sun in creating the Tortured Life collage and subsequently cut up a proof of that print into horizontal strips on a guillotine and re-collaged them together again to make Experience, while bromides of the same image became soldiers’ uniforms in a later sheet, (Wittgenstein the Soldier).
Five prints from As Is When still hung in the kitchen of his country home in 1980.  Among them Tortured Life and Experience were the sheets that he said had given him the most pleasure from among his many graphic works.  ‘These are the ones I like best,’ he said in 1976. ‘These are ones I keep looking at.’

Quotes from:

Eduardo Paolozzi   Diane Patrick   Studio Vista   London   1970  SBN 28979756 x
Editions Alecto   Tessa Sidey   Lund Humphries   Aldershot   2003   ISBN 0 85331 877 8
Kelpra Studio; The Rose and Chris Prater Gift; Artists’ Prints 1961-1980   Tate Gallery   1980  Introduction by Pat Gilmour.

 



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