Erró’s Generous Gift on Display
opens 23 June 2001
Reykavík Art Museum – Harbour House / Erró Collection
Reykavík Art Museum – Harbour House / Erró Collection
Erró – Retrospective
From June 23rd 2001
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 lifes work to the city of Reykjavík. 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 Reykjavík 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 Errós 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 Errós 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 Ólafsvík, on the west coast of Iceland, and was brought up in Kirkjubæjarklaustur in the south. He graduated as an art instructor from the Reykjavík 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 capitals progressive art scene, and since then he has lived and worked in Paris until this day.
To view the new exhibition space at the Harbour House click:
www.landmat.com/listasafn/
For further information please contact:
Soffía Karlsdóttir, tel. 354-552-6131 / 354 820-1202 fax 354 562-6191