ART HISTORY, POLITICS, SCIENCE FICTION – ERRÓ
Erró (Guðmundur Guðmundsson, b. 1932) is an Icelandic-born artist with an international career who has lived in Paris since 1958. A pivotal moment in Erró’s work occurred in the early 1960s when he began incorporating imagery from mass culture into his paintings, aligning with the spirit of contemporary Pop Art. Erró’s art is created by collecting, selecting, combining, and replicating existing images: comic strips, magazine photographs, advertisements, and masterpieces from art history—all of which constitute the foundation of his work.
The small exhibition space Small Hall at the art museum features three collages that serve as studies for paintings, including works created for the Paris Science Museum. These collages depict famous engineers and scientists. They offer fascinating insights into the process behind Erró’s large-scale paintings. These miniature compositions allow him to experiment with the interplay of images before translating them onto canvas in oil paint. One of the collages is a study for the painting Sci-Fi Landscape, which is on display in the exhibition hall.
The colorful, action-packed world of science fiction comics has been a rich source of material for Erró’s comic-themed paintings. Familiar heroes from various series meet on the same canvas, removed from their original contexts and free from the traditional rhythm of comic storytelling. These paintings abandon narrative structure, presenting instead an endless stream of figures suspended in the vastness of imagined space.
In his Art History series, Erró reinterprets paintings by his favorite modernist masters. Works by Picasso, Léger, and Matisse from different periods undergo new syntheses in Erró’s hands. This process is not merely one of replication but involves the juxtaposition and synthesis of carefully selected details from iconic works, serving as both a creative reinterpretation and an engaging lesson in art history.
The exhibition also includes three politically charged paintings from the 1970s, in which Erró offers his satirical take on topics such as Nazism, Israeli politics, and the Chilean coup. Among these works is Eva Braun’s Dream, where Erró freely combines stories, including the dreams of Hitler’s wife and excerpts from a love story between a German girl and an American soldier.
Erró has donated a significant portion of his paintings to the foundational collection of the Erró Museum, which is being established outside Reykjavik. The director of the Reykjavik Art Museum, Gunnar Kvaran, curated an extensive exhibition from this collection, titled Art History, Politics, Science Fiction. The exhibition, en route from Paris to Iceland, is being showcased across the Nordic countries in 1993, including Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Pori Art Museum, and the Gothenburg Art Museum.
This exhibition provides Finnish art audiences with their first opportunity to engage with Erró’s art on this scale.
Translated with ChatGPT