Erró: Freehand

In this exhibition on the 3^rd floor some of Erró’s early works, where freehand line and form are foregrounded, meet later collaged-based works that source, freely mix and quote found visual material. Through them it is possible to follow Erró’s curiousity and quest in developing his collage-painting method, or visual quotation; a practice he continues to this day. A sense of restless, dynamic ability to entangle and change resonates in the human or human-like forms that move across the two-dimensional surfaces. In these works, these forms evolve over time – first as loosely, energetically drawn images from Erró’s imagination and then as layered collaged references that directly represent and rely on different print sources and places.

Erró (b. 1932, Ólafsvík) lives and works in Paris, where he arrived in 1956 by way of Norway, Germany and Italy. Erró was among the most prominent figures of the European avant-garde of the 1960s and is associated not only with the renewal of pictorial figuration, due to his invention of narrative collage-paintings, but also with the Happenings movement and experimental cinema. Although his work is often, rightly, attached to artistic groups like Surrealism, Narrative Figuration or Pop art, it cannot be reduced to any one of them.