Gambit – Erró, Chronicler of Current Affairs

"I feel like I'm a kind of chronicler, a reporter for an organization that stores all the images of the world, and it's my job to compile them." -Erró

In the exhibition Gambit, you can see how the artist Erró (b. 1932) has continuously documented the turmoil of his own time. He draws rulers, tyrants and warlords into his visual world where they face ridicule, mockery and parody.

In his works, Erró looks at world history with a critical eye. By mixing together different and contradictory image fragments, he dissolves the traditional narrative, twists the rhetoric of spindoctors and undermines the society of the spectacle. Glorified propaganda is equated with offensive stereotypes and the notion of hierarchy is turned on its head. The world reflected in Erró’s work is a combustible mixture of chaos and contradictions, excess and violence.

The exhibition is composed of a selection of paintings, collages, drawings and prints where Erró bears witness to the political reality of his time. It also carries ominous reverberations from the current Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Ukraine and other war-ridden territories. Furthermore, there is the underlying fear of World War III and the escalating nuclear threat.

Throughout his long artistic career, Erró has been interested in ideological and military conflicts, which have dominated world news in the 20th and 21st centuries. References to the crimes and horrors of Nazism appear in works in the exhibition, as do allusions to the long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies. Erró also focuses on the two Persian Gulf Wars, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, coups in South America, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution and apartheid in South Africa.

Most of the works in the exhibition come from the Erró-Collection of Reykjavík Art Museum and span the artists's sixty-year career. The exhibition is curated by Danielle Kvaran.