In 1989 the Icelandic nation had the good fortune to receive a most generous gift, when the artist Erro' donated a large collection of his life?s work to the city of Reykjavik. The collection includes paintings, watercolours, prints, sculpture, collages, cartoons, etc. In April 2000 the ReykjavÃk Art Museum opened its new exhibition space at the Harbour House in Tryggvagata, where the Erro' collection will be housed from now on.
In 1989 the Icelandic nation had the good fortune to receive a most generous
gift, when the artist Erró donated a large collection of his life?s work to the
city of ReykjavÃk. The collection includes paintings, watercolours, prints,
sculpture, collages, cartoons, etc. This magnificent collection has continued
to grow in recent years and by this time numbers more than three thousand
artworks.
Icelanders have waited a long time for the collection to be honoured in a
proper manner by providing it with a permanent location. This happened finally
in April 2000 when the ReykjavÃk Art Museum opened its new exhibition space at
the Harbour House in Tryggvagata, where the Erró collection will be housed from
now on.
The retrospective of Erró?s works at the Harbour House / Erró collection
occupies all of its exhibition halls and part of the exhibition will be a
permanent installation.
The exhibition of Erró?s oeuvre will be organized so that visitors can follow
his artistic development back through time from the latest works to the
beginning of his career. New works in very large format, shown for the first
time, will fill hall A on the ground floor. Works from various series? Erró has
worked on continuously during the past three decades will be in hall B. Hall C
will be dedicated to drawings, collages and works in other media, and in hall D
there will be a presentation of his films and performances from the sixties.
Halls E and F will carry works from the fifties and sixties, when his pictorial
language was developing towards the pictorial vision he is now famous for.
ERRÓ
Erró was born in 1932 in ÓlafsvÃk, on the west coast of Iceland, and was
brought up in Kirkjubæjarklaustur in the south. He graduated as an art
instructor from the ReykjavÃk College of Art and Crafts in 1949. Afterwards he
attended art academies in Oslo, Florence and Ravenna.
In 1956 Erró produced his first collages alongside richly expressive post-
surrealist paintings. In the early 1960s he began transferring his collages to
painting and soon became one of the standard-bearers of Pop Art and European
narrative painting.
In 1958 Erró settled in Paris, where he made the personal acquaintance of
leading surrealists and soon became an active member of the French capital?s
progressive art scene, and since then he has lived and worked in Paris until
this day.
For further information please contact:
SoffÃa Karlsdóttir, tel. 354-552-6131/354 820-1202 fax 354 562-6191
ReykjavÃk Art Museum - Harbour House
Tryggvagata 17, ReykjavÃk