Born in 1924 in Edinburgh of Italian parents. Studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 and later at the St. Martin's School of Art and the Slade School in 1945. When he moved to Paris, he met Giacometti, Brancusi, Braque and Leger and was influenced by Surrealism. Back in London, he began to experiment with serigraphic techniques and designed in 1951, textiles and wallpaper and sculpted a well for the Festival of Britain. He was a founder member of the Independent Group at the ICA, London.

His slide projections, Bunk, started in 1947 were collages of cuttings from advertising, comic-strips, design and magazines. They provoked a controversial debate which had an influence on the development of Pop Art.

His works "Jason", 1956 and "Large Frog", 1958 are examples of assemblages of unrelated ordinary objects - often fragments of abandoned machinery - into figures. He collaborated with other artists to organise the exhibition called 'Parallel of Life and Art' using themes of the mass media, science and technology and their significance for contemporary art. His robotlike, pseudo-mechnical sculptures became more geometrical at the beginning of the 1960's, when he studied the works of philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In 1971 the Tate Gallery in London devoted a comprehensive retrospective of his work and in 1974 he went to Berlin on the artists' exchange scheme. From 1977 to 1981 he was Professor of Ceramics at the Art and Design Department of the Fachhochschule, Cologne. In 1986 he was made "Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland" by the Queen.