Erró

Erró Biography

B. 1932, Olafsvik, Iceland – Lives and works between France and Spain

Erró has gained international recognition as a leader of Figuration Narrative – a French pendant to Pop Art that emerged in the early 1960s – and a pioneer of painted collage, which he compares to automatic writing. Originally close to the Surrealist circle in Paris, he radically renounced his own imaginary representations to make collage the exclusive matrix of his flamboyant oeuvre following his discovery of American mass consumer culture during a trip to New York in 1963-64. His technique consists in painting strictly after preliminary montages of ready-made images such as comics, advertisements, postcards and reproductions of masterpieces, which he thoroughly archives from all over the world to fuel his serial work. Politicians, celebrities, superheroes, aliens and warriors stand among the most recurrent motifs of Erró’s often monumental, kaleidoscopic accumulations, in which different civilizations and ideologies deliriously collide to better capture the absurdity of our contemporary propagandas from current affairs to popular fantasies.

Born in Olafsvik, Iceland in 1932, Erró studied art in Norway and Italy, and has resided in France, Thailand, and on the island of Formentera for most of his life. In 1989 he donated a large collection of his works to the Reykjavik Arts Museum, which has regular exhibitions on rotating display.

Erró has been exhibited at Hafnarhús Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Turku Art Museum, Turku, Finland; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Etienne, France; Today Art  permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou; National Gallery of Iceland; Reykjavik City Museum; Fondation Louis Vuitton; and more.