Art review: Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi – I want to be a machine, SNGMA, Edinburgh

Eduardo Paolozzi and Andy Warhol were contemporaries. Born in 1928, Warhol was just four years the junior. Both were sons of first generation immigrants, but though that doesn’t seem to be refelcted in Warhol’s work, it was definitive in Paolozzi’s. One of his major works, Manuscript of Monte Cassino, is, for instance, a profound rumination on time, displacement and the dislocation of war. It is also monumental. There is nothing remotely comparable in Warhol’s art which seems instead determinedly to reflect the transience and immediacy of contemporary culture. That doesn’t make it any less significant, but it does suggest how much difference there is between the two. Nevertheless the exhibition Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi: I want to be a machine starts from the proposition that they had a lot in common. Elaborating this idea, it is certainly a rich show of the work of both.