Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was born in Leith, Scotland to Italian parents, and studied at Edinburgh College of Art, St. Martin's School of Art and then finally the Slade School of Fine Art. During the late 1940s Paolozzi moved to Paris, where he met Dadaists Jean Arp and Tristan Tzara, and the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti amongst many others. He returned to London in 1949, and taught at the Central School of Art and Design. During this period Paolozzi became an important member of the Independent Group, a loosely formed group of artists, architects, sculptors, academics and critics based around the Institute of Contemporary Art, and from where British Pop emerged. In 1956 Paolozzi collaborated on a section of the seminal This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, organised by Richard Hamilton, John McHale, Alison and Peter Smithson and curator Bryan Robertson amongst others. Arguably Paolozzi's most significant contributions to British Pop were his collages, constructed from pieces of magazines, advertisements and typeface. Throughout the 1960s and beyond Paolozzi received numerous public commissions in Britain and throughout Europe, held various professorships in Germany and his work was acquired by numerous public collections. He was made a CBE in 1968, an RA in 1979 and knighted in 1989. He died in 2005. During the 1950s, Paolozzi's sculpture was concerned with the overlap between man and machine, between present and future, between flesh and metal. Exhibitions such as This is Tomorrow (1956) and Man, Machine and Motion (1955) explored the liminal space between the human, the industrial and the technological, and the possibilities that an ever approaching future held for the human form. A fascination with popular culture representations of cyborgs, automata, cybernetics, robots and hybrids proclaimed that a terrifying dehumanisation of the figure was the inevitable consequence of modern advancements. Like Richard Hamilton, who had trained as an electrical engineer, Paolozzi was enamoured with industrial processes and manufacturing, collaborating during the 1960s with industrial engineering firms. 'Robot' is part of a series of sculptures that Paolozzi constructed during the mid-1950s concerned with the problem of the figuration and the machine age, and was exhibited as part of his seminal 1958 Hanover Gallery exhibition. Cast in bronze, a traditional sculptural medium, Paolozzi's treatment of the bronze speaks of a very modern era. The surface of the bronze is pock-marked, scarred and scored in violent, disfiguring gestures, as though in a state of disintegration. Paolozzi's casting technique has been compared to his collage practice - a process of building up wax and adding any objects to hand, including debris and detritus, often industrial in nature. Somewhere between man and machine, this robot strides in manner similar to ancient Egyptian sculpture Paolozzi would have seen in the British Museum. But here he subverts the humanism of past sculptural forms to instead envisage a future where man-made technology consumes all bu the very last semblance of humanity. The sympathetically carved or sensitively modelled man of his predecessors is transformed into a marching automaton. Following the historic success of the Hanover Gallery exhibition, Paolozzi's unique artistic vision drove him to ever great heights of acclaim. Many of the works shown in London in 1958, including the present work, were then brought to the Venice Biennale in 1960 when Paolozzi represented Britain. His innovative technique and singular ability to interpret the conditions of a rapidly developing technological age - highlighting man's fraught relationship with offspring of his scientific and artistic imagination - won him deserved international recognition that he has maintained ever since.