Erró – Dolls

At no point in the history of art can dolls be said to have been popular subjects. It was therefore surprising when Erró, in the late 1980s, started creating collages and later paintings using photographs in which the main focus is on dolls. Most of the photographs were taken from pre-World War I illustrated almanacs.

The ingenuity and strength of Erró’s work emerges in the dialogue between the dolls, inanimate objects in human form, and their juxtaposition with portraits of historic figures, with obvious and clear cultural and aesthetic references (portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley; image of Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in 1930 film The Blue Angel; well-know paintings such as Albrecht Dürer’s portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher (1526), Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer (ca. 1665) and shipwrecked sailors from The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1819). In his doll collages, Erró creates an enchanting narrative whilst raising questions about the link between the viewer and reality.