Eduardo Paolozzi

I couldn't track down a name for this one, but the year puts it right in the stretch where he was working with an engineering firm to mass-produce cast aluminium forms — some from that batch were built as literal playground equipment for a shop. He's tagged as the godfather of Pop Art, but this run of work reads more like an industrial catalogue than a collage of magazine cuttings.

The Latin title translates to something like 'from the greatest to the least' — apparently the idea was to move from huge industrial machinery down to the smallest particles of matter, all packed into one bronze. It's set right by a glasshouse full of tropical plants, an odd pairing that might be the whole point. By this stage he'd moved a long way from the collage aesthetic that got him called the godfather of Pop Art — this is all cast gears and blocky machine parts instead.

Apparently he sculpted this one back in the 1990s but it never got cast until 2024, using a small maquette he'd given years earlier to someone who lived nearby. When it finally went up, the story got messier — a descendant of the writer it depicts called it 'hideous' in the press. Not everyone locally seems thrilled either.

According to what I've picked up, Paolozzi was part of the London scene often credited with helping Pop art get going in the 1950s, years before Warhol picked up the idea over in the US. By the time he made this one, he'd moved into these heavy, machine-part-looking bronzes — a shift from collage to hard metal that a lot of the writing treats as its own turning point for him.

Apparently this was part of Santa Cruz's first international street-sculpture show, and he flew out four times just to get the placement right. He's usually filed under Pop Art — cutting up old ads and magazine photos into collages — but locals here have catalogued this one in a different line entirely: poured concrete blocks, no paper or glue in sight.