The Schirn Kunsthalle Opens an Exhibition of "Erró: Portrait and Landscape"

Written by Heidi Offenbach Sunday, 22 April 2012 23:02

Frankfurt, Germany  - The Schirn Kunsthalle is proud to present "Erró: Portrait and Landscape", on view at the museum from October 6th through January 8th 2012. The Icelandic artist Erró is one of the great solitary figures of twentieth- century art. At once Pop and Baroque, eye-catching and narrative, critical of society and humorous, moral and inscrutable, over the past fifty years he has produced an opulent, unmistakable oeuvre that resists all categorization. His critical narrative collages reproduce in painting combinations of pictorial elements from various popular sources to create eloquent, often disturbing tableaux. As reflections on great social themes such as politics, war, sexuality, science, and art, these dense visual arrangements seem to create a comprehensive atlas of images of the modern world.

On the occasion of Iceland’s turn as guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Schirn will show Erró’s series “Scapes” and, for the first time, the artist’s entire cycle of “Monsters” from 1968. This bizarre series of double portraits confronts the official likenesses of prominent persons with a second, monstrously distorted face. Erró films from the 1960s will be shown as a link between the two work groups. Nothing about Erró’s art is understated. A firm believer that more is better, this Icelandic artist creates jam-packed, dynamic, and often raucous paintings. Working in series and deploying a kaleidoscope of cartoon characters, art icons, and public figures, he comments on pressing political issues, references art history, and delights in wreaking visual havoc. Erró settled in Paris in 1958 after studying in Reykjavik, Oslo, and Florence. His early tempera-and-ink paintings depicting ghoulish figures firmly situate him in the postwar European figurative art scene. In 1963, his encounter with American Pop art on his first trip to New York proved decisive, and he began employing mass-culture imagery to explore social and cultural contradictions inherent in a world of never-ending consumption. From the very beginning, Erró also made collages—a technique that has been essential to his art—and has unceasingly investigated and amassed an ever-expanding archive of images culled from around the world. Comprising newspaper and magazine clippings, posters, leaflets, postcards, advertisements, and, importantly, comics, this wealth of materials provides the sources for the collages, which in turn he projects onto canvases and paints. Collage enables Erró to fashion startling combinations which can appear humorous or ironic but, on closer observation, can also be deeply unsettling. Indeed, in many of Erró’s paintings, shiny, smooth surfaces belie pointed political critiques and complex psychological investigations.


The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is one of Germany’s most renowned exhibition institutions. Since its founding in 1986, the Schirn has mounted approximately 180 exhibitions, including major survey shows devoted to the Vienna Jugendstil, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, to women Impressionists, to subjects such as “shopping — a century of art and consumer culture,” the visual art of the Stalin era, new Romanticism in contemporary art, and the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large solo exhibitions have featured artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Julian Schnabel, James Ensor, James Lee Byars, Yves Klein, Peter Doig, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Georges Seurat. And artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Ayse Erkmen, Carsten Nicolai, Jan De Cock, Jonathan Meese, John Bock, Michael Sailstorfer, Terence Koh, Aleksandra Mir, Eberhard Havekost, and Mike Bouchet have developed new exhibitions for the Schirn. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt showcases highly charged themes and topical aspects of artists’ oeuvres with an incisive voice and from a contemporary standpoint. As a site of discoveries, the Schirn offers its visitors an original, sensory exhibition experience as well as active participation in cultural discourse. Visit the kunsthalle's website at ... http://www.schirn.de

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