Master of the Universe

This sculpture is a smaller casting of Eduardo Paolozzi’s monumental public statue Newton after Blake, which is sited in the piazza of the British Library in London, and was erected in 1997. The figure references a multi-modal work by William Blake, executed from 1795 to 1805, a piece which criticises the polymath Isaac Newton’s strict scientific approach to understanding the natural world. Being positioned outside of one of the largest collections of information in history, Paolozzi's work is an ironic reminder to the observer of the potential for knowledge which is held inside the building, and a cautionary statement on the extent to which preoccupying ourselves with this knowledge might cause us to stray from the real beauty of the universe.

Newton is mechanised in the fashion of much of Paolozzi’s work. The circular forms that protrude from his body present the figure as machine-like. The stoic nature of his concentrating expression, paired with the restrictive geometric proportions from which he is conceived, work to parallel the empirical and mathematic nature of the activity that Newton is engaged in.