Erro

Born in 1932, Gudmundur Gudmundsson, who works under the pseudonym Erró, is an Icelandic artist known for his Pop art paintings, collages and prints. His works blend a vibrant cartoon style with real life cultural and political figures. Through these combinations Erró creates biting and humorous commentary on mass consumerism, the media, war, and politics.

Erró’s Career and Key Exhibitions

The artist studied plastic arts, painting and print-work at the Beaux-Arts de Reykjavík and the Academy of Oslo between 1949 and 1952, before moving to Florence to study Mosaic Fine Art in 1955. Settling in Paris in 1958, Erró began exhibiting his prints shortly after graduating. His works can now be seen in museums across the globe. You can now find Erró art for sale globally, including here, on Rise Art’s website.

In the 1960s, Erró was one of the radical artists who co-founded the Narrative Figuration movement in France, creating works focused on the subversive political potential of art. Alongside painting and print work, the artist was also a prominent figure in the Happenings movement and experimental cinema. As such, Erró is a leading artist within art history and museum culture.

In 2003, Gudmundur Gudmundsson was one of the artists chosen to take part in the Los Angeles International Biennial, and an exhibition of his works, Variations on Animation, was shown at the Louis Stern Fine Art Gallery. There have been multiple major retrospectives of his work, the first held at the gallery Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2010 and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon in 2015.

Most recently, in 2022, Erró’s work returned to Iceland for a retrospective at the Reykjavík Art Museum. In the same year, he was one of the artists chosen to take part in the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary which took place across Berlin from the gallery Akademie der Künste and KW art museum to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart.

Style and Approach

Erró’s early years working in Paris shaped his perspective. In this period, when conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam were flooding television and newspapers, Erró first encountered American Pop art and realised that the new movement had the power to critique political events with the language of mass media.

Paying hommage to Pop artist and printmakers such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, Gudmundur Gudmundsson mines popular imagery from advertisements, comics and posters which he splices with contemporary political figures, creating a cacophony of visual associations for the viewer.

Through his provocative combinations of pop images, Erró seeks to unmask the realities of everyday life in consumer society by revealing the manipulative power behind image-making. Erró creates prints using a lithograph process. His illustrative approach to lithography imitates the flat style of a comic-strip.

The artist has referenced other artists and their art as in his works, appropriating the work of Van Gogh, Picasso and Léger in his Hommage series – Hommage à Picasso and Hommage à Fernand Léger.