Bandaged Head

Diane Kirkpatrick uses the word 'human-landscapes' to describe Paolozzi's early works, and heads were his first human-landscapes. A 1953 London exhibition The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head may have helped to focus his attention on the expressive possibilities of the head. The heads are small, just head and shoulders, with a minimum of visual details, allowing the artist to create a gesture-pose for each figure fragment. In the present work the head is tilted up, all the features apart from the nose swathed in a bandage, any expression masked apart from the questioning angle of the face (see D. Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Connecticut, 1969, p. 27).