The Schirn Kunsthalle Shows a Solo "Erró: Portrait and Landscape"

Written by Matilde Schenker Tuesday, 13 March 2012 22:42

Frankfurt.- The Schirn Kunsthalle is pleased to present "Erró: Portrait and Landscape", a solo exhibition of works by the Icelandic painter Erró. "Erró: Portrait and Landscape" will be on view at the museum from 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 cate-gorization. Erró's 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.

Erró (born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in 1932 in Ólafsvík, Iceland) is a postmodern artist. He studied art in Norway and in Italy, and has resided in Paris, Thailand and on the island of Formentera for most of his life. In 1989 he donated a large collection of his works to the Reykjavik Arts Museum, which has put part of it on permanent display and opened a website where the whole collection can be visited.


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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