The first major English-language monograph on Icelandic Pop artist Erró establishes his primacy among today’s significant figurative artists. Erró, Iceland’s most prominent painter, receives long overdue critical attention for his contributions to international Pop, late Surrealism, and contemporary figurative painting in this sumptuous monograph. Since introducing exclusively source-image-based painted collage to the European Pop movement in 1959, Erró has produced an influential body of work mining cartoons and art history on canvases marked by political satire and his own cheerfully dystopian observations of human nature.
Prescient and timely, Erró’s paintings are marked by a voracious consumption of imagery synthesizing a hallucinatory vision of contemporary visual culture. Often compared to Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, Erró’s multifigure narratives, refusal to commit to a singular style, and obsession with cartoons set his practice apart. An essay by Ruba Katrib connects Erró to today’s figurative-painting practices, and a chronology by Danielle Kvaran traces his wild figurations of history and subjects, ranging from Winston Churchill to contemporary music icons. Newly photographed details and a concentration on Erró’s canvases of the last ten years offer a fresh perspective to his European audience and a welcome introduction for his American one.