Chairman Mao’s Long Journey, Amsterdam, 2020

Erró   Best sellers Famous Artists

Gudmundur Erró is an Icelandic artist born in 1932.

He studied painting at the Fine Arts School in Reykjavik and Oslo from 1949 to 1952, then mosaic at the Fine Arts School in Florence in 1955. In these schools, he initially specialized in the technique of paper cuts before focusing on mosaic. He moved to Paris in 1958 and met artists who were part of the Surrealist movement.

In the world of comics, Erró brought together cartoon characters and historical despots. He constantly gleans visuals in newspapers, advertising, or illustration, in order to make up his collages these include cultural samples from all the countries he visited. In this manner, comics and Chinese propaganda can and are on the same level.

He is able to create a visual impact, mixing both the temporal aspect and boundaries. Seeing a Walt Disney hero next to a dictator isn't surprising. He is committed through his works and tackles politics at full throttle. In order to denounce and criticize the events, he plays around with humor and derision. Totalitarian regimes, consumerism, and the Iraq war are his main weapons in the artistic struggle.

Before, he was used to working in cycles, his collages move from one universe to the other, creating large gaps, going from a series of eroticism to a second one, pertaining to space conquest. In his work  "Méca-Make-Up", Erró extracts faces of models from the press and then assembles them with mechanical materials that belong to cars or cameras.

His works are present in museums throughout the world and are used as references for narrative figuration and collages.