Erró, Ice Cream for Mao

Guðmundur Guðmundsson, aka Erró, is an Icelandic Pop artist, mainly associated with NO!art and Narrative Figuration. Immersed in the Paris art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, Erró committed to a collage style of painting, critical of its social, political and historical context. The artist began to start his paintings by producing collages, combining elements from popular imagery found in art history, political propaganda, advertisements and comics, before projecting and painting them onto canvas. From the 1980s onwards, Erró involved computer programs to arrange his pictures in a net-like, stereoscopic manner. His pop cultural imagery earned him comparisons to earlier Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist. Seeking a de-mythologisation of everyday life in consumer society, Erró looked to manifest the underlying power structures by drawing awareness to the procedures behind image-making, and thus the manipulative power behind them. One facet of his work is the investigation into the value relation between original and reproduced images and the effect of the abundance of images released by mass media on human perception and sensitivity. In 2010, the Centre Pompidou in Paris held a major retrospective of 50 years’ worth of his artistic output. Érro was born 1932 in Olafsvik, Iceland. He lives and works in Paris, France.

Erró, Ice Cream for Mao