Paolozzi was born of Italian immigrant parents in Edinburgh, Scotland. After being interned briefly, he was conscripted into the army during the Second World War and served with the Pioneer Corps. His father and uncle, also interned and sent to the Canadian camps, died en route when their ship was torpedoed. Paolozzi studied at the Ruskin School of Art and then from 1944-47 at the Slade School of Art in London. He then moved to Paris, where he met Giacometti, Brancusi and Braque and was influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism. On his return to London in 1949, he shared a studio with Lucien Freud and came into contact with Francis Bacon. In 1951, while working as a professor at the Central School of Art, he won his first important sculptural commission - a fountain for the Festival of Britain. He later became professor at the St. Martin's School of Art for a year before joining the staff at the Royal College of Art where he remained until 2000. He has also taught in Hamburg, as professor of ceramics at the Fachhochschule in Cologne (1977-81), as professor of sculpture at the Akdemie für bildende Kunst in Munich (1981-91) and at the University of California in Berkeley. Early on, in 1952, he showed at the Vienna Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He embraced Pop Art in 1956 and his 12 screenprints, As is When epitomise that period. His work as a printmaker, ceramicist and above all, sculptor, is of major importance and he received many high-profile commissions, including the statue of Isaaac Newton outside the British Library. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1979, knighted in 1989 and made Queen's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1986.

Right: photograph of Paolozzi by Ida Kar, 1959