The material of the exhibition, which includes 54 oil paintings and 21 collages, was selected by Dr. Hans Joachim Neyer, director of the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hannover (museum of caricature and graphics of social criticism) and by Gunnar B. Kvaran, former director of the Municipal Museum of Reykjavik. Visitors can be acquainted with a cross-section of Erró’s central themes: from the collages produced in the ‘50s to his work entitled Sarajevo, 1995, a large-sized oil painting created in the style of comics. Erró’s art is not unknown in Hungary, his picture Samurai Ladies belongs to the collection of our museum, and in 1995 some of his works were exhibited in Galéria 56.
The lcelander Erró was born in Olafsvik in 1932. In 1958 he settled in Paris, where he organized a number of happenings with his friend Jean-Jacques Lebel in the ‘60s in order to publicly protest against the political brutality of the time. Erró is a real globe-trotter and during his journeys he became acquainted with a multitude of cultures. In 1957 he spent 8 months in Israel, in the ‘60s he travelled to the United States (New York), and then he visited the Soviet Union. Since 1970 he has visited Thailand and other countries in the Far East regularly. His works show sensitivity to social phenomena. In 1993 a museum devoted to Erró’s oeuvre was opened near Reykjavik.
In the spirit of Dadaist traditions, Erró started to produce socially, historically and politically ironic collages in the mid-50s. Using these as a basis he started to make oil paintings in 1959–1960: the collages, projected onto the canvas, served as sketches for the paintings. Then he divided his paintings into constructed, quadratic details and since the ‘80s he designs computer aided pictures in a net-like, stereoscopic manner, in the squares of which he places motifs. Erró’s work consists of series of images that relate imaginary stories about a person or an object. His unreal visual narratives draw the attention to the contradiction between the individual elements of the picture and to their innate connection in their content at the same time.
Erró is a historical painter of the 20th century, who picks elements from the inexhaustible visual resource of art history, political propaganda, comics and advertisements. With his works he not only criticizes society but also refers to general phenomena such as the value relation between original and reproduced images or the effect of the abundance of images released by the media on human perception and sensitivity.
The exhibition is sponsored by AFAA (Association Française d’ Action Artistique) and AB-AEGON (General Insurance Share Company).
