Errö
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
«Collage is the most exciting part of my work, the most free; it’s almost automatic writing. That’s where I find formal solutions to fill the space, my “all-over” side, as they say for American abstract artists. Collage is both the original and the model.»
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
Born Gudmundur Gudmondsson on July 19, 1932, Erro is an Icelandic post-modern artist. From 1949 to 1954, Erro studied art in Reykjavik, then in Oslo and Florence. He then enrolled at the School of Mosaic in Ravenna in 1955, before settling in Paris in 1958, where he met artists, writers and critics of the Surrealist movement such as André Breton, Brauner, Masson, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Miro and even Duchamp.
In 1964, in New York, he definitively abandoned the idea of creating personal forms and embarked on his famous «collage paintings». Throughout his life, Erro traveled to all corners of the world and collected images (news photos, advertisements, comic books, posters, political documents) that served as his source of inspiration. He then selected them, assembled them, and accumulated them on canvases.
From each of his journeys emerge reservoirs of funny, ironic, or even militant images from which he often creates series, such as Chinese, political, or erotic cycles, among others. This pioneer of the narrative figuration movement reveals and denounces, through his works, the absurdities – or even aberrations – of contemporary society. Thus, this artist, who is in fact neither conventional nor traditional, combines cartoon characters and historical despots in a universe that is the dominant medium of comics. Each of his works is a cultural sample inspired by all the countries Erro has traveled throughout his career.
