Gudmundur Erro

MISS AMERICA

1968-69

Erró has gained international recognition as a leader of Figuration Narrative–a French pendant to Pop Art that emerged in the early 1960s–and a pioneer of painted collage, which he compares to automatic writing. Originally close to the Surrealist circle in Paris, he radically renounced his own imaginary representations to make collage the exclusive matrix of his flamboyant oeuvre following his discovery of American mass consumer culture during a trip to New York in 1963–1964. His technique consists in painting strictly after preliminary montages of ready-made images such as comics, advertisements, postcards and reproductions of masterpieces, which he thoroughly archives from all over the world to fuel his serial work. Politicians, celebrities, superheroes, aliens and warriors stand among the most recurrent motifs of Erró’s often monumental, kaleidoscopic accumulations, in which different civilisations and ideologies deliriously collide to better capture the absurdity of our contemporary propagandas from current affairs to popular fantasies.