THE ART OF ERRO
Review by Gwen Stolyarov, New York
The first major American survey of work by Iceland’s most acclaimed contemporary painter will be on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery from April 13 to July 17, 2004. Worldscapes: The Art of Erró features approximately 80 paintings and collages, as well as props from the artist’s avant-garde films. SimultaneouslyConcurrently, 10 large paintings from Erró’s series titled Femmes Fatales, 1987—95, will be shown uptown at Goethe-Institut New York while a recent suite of lithographs, Mao’s Last Visit to Venice, will be on view at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs. Erró, who encountered American Pop art during several extended visits to New York in the 1960s, is best known for his colorful, jam-packed postmodern history paintings that mix and juxtapose styles. Not content simply to blur the boundaries between high and low, Erró deploys a kaleidoscope of cartoon characters, art historical icons, and government leaders to comment on urgent social and political issues.
A firm believer that more is better, Erró moved Pop into—as art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto has noted—its Baroque phase. “We’re pleased to work with the Reykjavik Museum of Art to introduce American audiences to the work of this significant Icelandic artist,” notes Lynn Gumpert, the Grey’s director. “What distinguishes his works from those of his American Pop counterparts is his commitment to create contemporary history paintings.” Erró observes: “By dealing with daily events, I try to interpret the present, a short period of time in the life of the society, before it enters total oblivion.”
Erró, who adopted this alias, was born Gudmundur Gudmundsson in Olafsvik, Iceland, in 1932. An inveterate traveler from early on, Erró studied in Reykjavik, Oslo, and Florence before settling in Paris in 1958. His early tempera-and-ink paintings on paper depict ghoulish grimacing figures entwined in seemingly never-ending struggles, and firmly situate him in the postwar European figurative art scene. An astute observer of art history, Erró incorporated references to works of art in his paintings long before appropriation became synonymous with postmodernism.
From the very beginning, the technique of collage proved essential to Erró’s art. He has amassed an ever-expanding archive of images—comprised of news and magazine clippings, posters, leaflets, postcards, reproductions, and comics—which provide source materials for the his collages. Dating from 1956 is the Radioactivity series, in which primordial, stick-figures interact with tabloid headlines such as “Flu Covers the World.” In 1958, he created a series of bold, colorful collages derived, in part, from fashion magazines. In them, women’s faces metamorphose into strange, mechanical hybrids, which inspired subsequent paintings in the Meca-Make-up series, such as Madame IBM, 1959—60, a startling portrait where an eye and a rouged mouth emerge out of a geometrical conglomeration surmounted by curls.
Paris in the early 1960s was hotbed of international artistic activity and political protest. Of his Meca-Make-up series, Erró observes: “It consisted of shock images, like insults. Everything, at that time was violent. There was the war in Algeria, then the war in Vietnam. Even rock music was violent.” Erró, along with artist and friend Jean-Jacques Lebel, participated in numerous happenings and performances, using his body and those of his collaborators as living grounds for political engagement. In one 1962 performance, two naked women wearing Kruschev and Kennedy masks wrestled in red paint, dramatizing a Cold War fight-to-the-death.
His first trip to New York in 1962 provided additional fodder and an important discovery, Pop art, which coincided with his interest in popular culture. But while James Rosenquist would juxtapose a woman’s profile, cars, and pasta, Erró’s works from the sixties would combine a political figure with vignettes from a Thomas Hart Benton mural and a Soviet Socialist Realist painting. American Pop thrived on the transformation of everyday reality into art, but Erró adopted this new language to display the contradictions inherent in a world of never-ending consumption. In Pop’s History, a landmark painting from 1967, Erró acknowledges his American colleagues and mocks the notion that Pop could have first surfaced anywhere but the U.S. In this key work, cartoonish, bearded Muscovites in fur hats frolic in the snow while excerpts from Pop classics—a Warhol Marilyn, a Wesselman reclining nude, an Oldenburg hamburger, for example—float above in balloons. In the 1960s, Erró also produced two experimental films, Grimaces and Concerto Mécanique, which will be screened in the exhibition at the Grey alongside the Surrealist-inspired assemblages and props he created for them.Erró continued to develop his history paintings in the 1970s, including a series on American astronauts and works such as CIA KGB, 1974—75. In Chinese paintings, from 1974—79, another series, he inserts Mao Zedong or figures from Socialist Realist posters into stylized urban backgrounds, for example, New York or Chicago. It is a contemporary reprise of this series produced as lithographs—Mao visiting Venice—that are on view at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs.
Later, in the 1980s and ’90s, Erró filled every inch of his canvases with brightly colored cartoon and comic-book figures, all vying for our attention. Exemplifying this abundant, horror vacui approach to painting, is the Femmes Fatales series. In each paintingpainting in this series, female figures abound—nuns, women warriors, television superstars, historical characters, and, most prominently, comic- book super heroines, such as Wonder Woman, Red Sonja, and Tank Girl. Here Erró simultaneously employs and undermines clichés, creating scenarios where women always reign supreme.
Erró has always worked in series, first creating collages that he then projects onto canvases and paints. He observes, “Assembling the collage is the most enjoyable part of the work. It offers the most freedom. It is almost like automatic writing. Here you discover formal solutions to filling the surface. The collage is simultaneously an original and a model. Then it’s just a matter of locking yourself up in the studio, sometimes for 15 hours at a stretch.”
Erró has shown prominently in Europe, including a 1999 solo exhibition at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. His work has been included in many exhibitions centering on post-war art in Europe, for example, the “Made in France” in 1997 and “Les Annees Années Pop” (The Pop Years), both at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1989, Erró donated over 3,000 works to the city of Reykjavik, and in 2001, a selection from the Erro Erró Collection was featured at the Harbour House, a recently opened branch of the Reykjavik Art Museum. “Erró’s gift to the Reykjavik Art Museum is one of the largest ever given to an Icelandic museum,” notes Eirikur Thorlaksson, director of the museum, and co-organizer of the exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery. “It is part of our mission to help shed more light on Icelandic culture, and the Erró Collection is providing one means to do so.”
Worldscapes: The Art of Erró will be on view at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, April 13 thru July 17, 2004; gallery hours: T, Th, F: 11am — 6pm, W: 11am — 8 pm, Sat: 11am — 5pm; tel: 212-998-6780; website: www.nyu.edu/greyart. Femmes Fatales will be on view at Goethe-Institut New York, 1014 Fifth Avenue, April 14 thru July 16, 2004; gallery hours: M thru F: 10am — 5pm; tel: 212-439-8700; website: www.goethe.de/newyork. Mao’s Last Visit to Venice will be on view at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs; 58 West 10th Street, April 19 thru May 28, 2004; gallery hours: M thru F: 10am — 5pm; tel: 212-992-9091; website: www.nyu.edu/vernon-center.
Worldscapes: The Art of Erró is co-organized by the Grey Art Gallery and the Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland. The Grey Art Gallery presentation is made possible in part by the Abby Weed Grey Trust, the Consulate General of Iceland, and Iceland Naturally. Educational programs are supported in part by the Grey Art Gallery’s Inter/National Council.
Public Programs to the Erró Show
in New Yorkat New York UniversityPolitical Populists—The Other Side of Pop Art | Thursday, April 15, 6:30 pm, Einstein Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant Street | Pop Art is often associated with the celebration of consumption, mass production, and popular culture. Examining Erró's art, critic Eleanor Heartney will consider the work of other artists and art movements who employ popular culture as an instrument for trenchant political critique—including Chinese Political Pop, Soviet Sots art, and artists inspired by Japanese Manga culture, as well as American figures such as Peter Saul, Renee Cox, David Wojnarowicz, and Jerry Kearns. — Co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art Professions (Steinhardt), and the Grey Art Gallery.
When Global Politics Meet Pop Culture: The Art of Erró | Thursday, April 22, 1 pm, Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs 58 West 10th Street | Join Gregory Volk, New York—based art critic and frequent Art in America contributor, in exploring Erró's unique mix of pop culture and global politics, including his startling series Mao’s Last Visit to Venice, on view at the Lillian Vernon Center. In series Director’s Brown Bags, hosted by Vera Jelinek, director of the Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs.
Organized by the Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs at NYU in co-operation with the Grey Art Gallery and the Reykjavik Art Museum. Website: www.nyu.edu/vernon.center at Goethe-Institut New York 1014 Fifth Avenue (at 83rd Street)Danto and Erró: A Dialogue | Wednesday, April 14, 7:30 pm | Erró embraced Pop art in New York in the mid-1960s. Later that decade political protests swept Europe, and he developed his political Pop. With funds from a German DAAD grant, he traveled throughout Europe and Asia, gathering ideas and images. In this conversation with Erró, art critic and Columbia University Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Arthur Danto will explore the role of the Superwoman in his work.
The Corset: Fashioning the Body | Thursday, May 13, 7:30 pm | Looking into the closets of Erró’s Femmes Fatales, Valerie Steele, Director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, will sketch a brief history of the most controversial garment in the history of fashion. Challenging prevailing notions of the corset as an unhealthy instrument designed to oppress women, she will trace its associations with self-discipline, youth, and beauty, and explore its current resurrection as a symbol of rebellion and female empowerment.
Fetish, Fantasy, and Suspense | Tuesday, June 22, 7:30 pm | Following last year’s screening of her film Warrior of Light at the BAM, independent German documentary filmmaker Monika Treut will return to New York to show Seduction: the Cruel Woman (1985) in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut’s exhibition of Erró’s Femmes Fatales. Following the screening, Treut--who is also known for Female Misbehavior (1992), featuring Camille Paglia and Annie Sprinkle, and Gendernauts (1999)--will speak on fetish, fantasy, and suspense.
Organized by the Goethe-Institut New York in co-operation with the Grey Art Gallery and the Reykjavik Art Museum, as part of the Institute's series on Gender and Sexuality.return to top ▲
