Biography

Gudmundur Gudmundsson, aka Erró, produces scathing, humorous visual indictments of war, autocracy, mass consumerism, and economic and cultural hegemony, and pays twisted homage to canonical artists throughout history in his colorful, cacophonous paintings, silkscreens, and collages. He began his career in the mid-1950s, painting ghoulish figures. Living in the midst of the ferment of 1960s Paris, as the battles in Algeria and Vietnam raged, shaped his outlook, while his first encounter with American Pop art in 1962 was a watershed moment. Since then, Erró has been mining mass media—including the Disney empire, comics, magazines, newspapers, and advertisements—and art history for his roiling compositions. In his words, “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.”