1932 Gudmundur Gudmundsson is born in Ólafsvík, Iceland.

1949 Gudmundur starts his studies at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts, Reykjavik.
1951 Studies painting, fresco and engraving at the Art Academy of Oslo, Norway.
1953 Goes on a study tour to Spain, Germany and France.
1954 Travels to Italy and Sicily. Starts using the artist's name Ferró.
1955-1957 Erró studies at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence. Then he studies Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna, Italy. He comes to Iceland and produces several mosaics in Reykjavik.
His first private exhibition is held in Galleria Santa-Trinita in Florence in the year 1955.
1957 Stays for eight months in Israel.
1958 Settles in Paris.
1962 Starts his first film, Grimaces with producer Claude Givaudan.
1962-1966 Erró goes to the Soviet Union for the first time. He also had several stays in New York during this period.

1967 Ferró was forced to change his name after being sued by a person with the same name. He drops the F and Ferró becomes Erró.

EXHIBITIONS:

2007 Erró: Toy Store, Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris

The Erro Collection, Reykjavík Art Museum - Kjarvalsstaðir, Reykjavik

Erró, recommended Dirimart, Istanbul

The Forgotten Future – Erro, Reykjavík Art Museum - Kjarvalsstaðir, Reykjavik

2006 Erró - Forgotten Future - aquarelles de 1981 à 2004.Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris

Erró - El Gran Collage del Mundo, IVAM - Institut Valencià dArt Modern, Valencia

2005 ERRO, recommended Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna

Erró. Retrospectiva 1958-2004, Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca  

2004 Boulgakov ou l’Esprit de liberté, avec Klasen et Monory, musée National des Beaux-Arts, Kiev, Ukraine
Worldscapes: The Art of Erro, Grey Art Gallery of New York University,  New York, U.S.A.
Erro: Les Femmes fatales, Goethe-Institut, New-York, U.S.A
Mao’s last Visit to Venice, Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs, New York University, New York, USA
Erro, tableaux chinois, Musée de la Tapisserie, Aix-en-Provence, France
Les Amazones en proverbes, Galerie Louis Carré et Cie, Paris, France
Erro, IUFM Confluence(s”), Lyon, France
Erro, Obras 1958-2003, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Havane, Cuba
Erro, aquarelles, Galerie Sonia Zannettacci, Genève, Suisse

2003 Erro, Hommage à Walt Disney, Galerie Louis Carré et Cie, Paris, France
Merrolyn Monroe and her friends, Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienne, Autriche

2002 Erro, La saga des comics américains, Espace Gustave Fayet, Sérignan, France
Erro, Renault et l’Art, Espace Renault, Boulogne-Billancourt, France 2002

2001 A retrospective of the Erró Collection at the Reykjavik Art Museum opens in the Museum's new building, Hafnarhus, June the 23rd.

Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finlande
The Erro Collection, Reykjavik Art Museum-Harbour House, Reykjavik, Islande
Collages 1958-2000, Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienne, Autriche
Erro: Rivisitando il passato, Galleria Tega, Milan, Italie
E-Mail Breakfast, Galerie Sonia Zannettacci, FIAC, Paris, France

2000 Erró creates a major decoration that is made in porcelain for a shopping centre in Reykjavik. Elected to receive the Honorary Artists Stipend by the Icelandic Parliament.

Compositeurs classiques, contrepoints,  Galerie Sonia Zannettacci, Genève.
Casa France-Brésil, Rio de Janeiro, Brésil.
Museo Universiterio Contemporaneo de Arte, Mexico, Mexique
Museo de Arte Moderno, Monterrey, Mexique.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgique
Erro: Images du siècle, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France
Erro, Political Painting, Bergen Billedgalleri, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen,  Norvège; Norsk Vasskraft og Industriads Museum, Odda, Norvège; Fylkesgalleriet, Forde, Norvège; Hong-Kong Arts Center, Hong-Kong
Erro, les femmes fatales, Musée des Beaux Arts, Caen, France
Antologia 1966-2000, Galeria Barro Alto, Lisbonne, Portugal
Contrepoints 1978-1983, Galeria Antonio Prates, Lisbonne, Portugal
1999 A major retrospective exhibition of his works in Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris

1996-1998 Works on a huge decoration that is made in porcelain for an underground Metro station in Lisbon, Portugal.
1998 Has a large exhibition in the new building of the Reykjavik Art Museum (Hafnarhus) as well as in Villa Tamaris, la Seyne-sur Mer in the south of France.
1997 Creates the Gudmunda S. Kristindóttir Memorial Award Fund. Gudmunda was his aunt
1994 Has a private exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum at Kjarvalsstadir. There he adds a number of paintings as well as all his letters and documents to the Erró Collection at the Reykjavik Art Museum.
1990 Trip to Vietnam.
1989 Erró makes an important donation of paintings and of all his archives to the City of Reykjavik. This donation marks the establishment of the Erró Collections within the Reykjavik Art Museum.
1978 Retrospective organized by the Arts Festival of Reykjavik. An Icelandic television film is made on Erró.
1977 Michel Lancelot and Georges Paumier make a 30min television film on Erró.
1972-1985 Erró stays several times in Thailand and in the Far-East.
1966-1971 Several stays in New York two trips to the Soviet Union. Erró receives a D.A.A.D. grant in Berlin, Germany. He goes on a nine months trip around the world.
1967 Erró travels to Cuba.
1963-1965 Participates in happenings with the artist J.J. Lebel. Makes his own happening, "Gold Water", which is performed in Paris.

Erró, who adopted this alias, was born Gudmundur Gudmundsson in Olafsvik, Iceland, in 1932. An inveterate traveler from early on, Erró studied in Reykjavik, Oslo, and Florence before settling in Paris in 1958. His early tempera-and-ink paintings on paper depict ghoulish grimacing figures entwined in seemingly never-ending struggles, and firmly situate him in the postwar European figurative art scene. An astute observer of art history, Erró incorporated references to works of art in his paintings long before appropriation became synonymous with postmodernism.

From the very beginning, the technique of collage proved essential to Erró’s art. He has amassed an ever-expanding archive of images–comprised of news and magazine clippings, posters, leaflets, postcards, reproductions, and comics–which provide source materials for his collages. Dating from 1956 is the Radioactivity series, in which primordial stick-figures interact with tabloid headlines such as “Flu Covers the World.” In 1958, he created a series of bold, colorful collages derived, in part, from fashion magazines. In them, women’s faces metamorphose into strange, mechanical hybrids, which inspired subsequent paintings in the Meca-Make-up series, such as Madame IBM, 1959–60, a startling portrait where an eye and a rouged mouth emerge out of a geometrical conglomeration surmounted by curls.

Paris in the early 1960s was hotbed of international artistic activity and political protest. Of his Meca-Make-up series, Erró observes: “It consisted of shock images, like insults. Everything at that time was violent. There was the war in Algeria, then the war in Vietnam. Even rock music was violent.” Erró, along with artist and friend Jean-Jacques Lebel, participated in numerous happenings and performances, using his body and those of his collaborators as living grounds for political engagement.  In one 1962 performance, two naked women wearing Kruschev and Kennedy masks wrestled in red paint, dramatizing a Cold War fight-to-the-death.

His first trip to New York in 1962 provided additional fodder and an important discovery, Pop art, which coincided with his interest in popular culture. But while James Rosenquist would juxtapose a woman’s profile, cars, and pasta, Erró’s works from the sixties would combine a political figure with vignettes from a Thomas Hart Benton mural and a Soviet Socialist Realist painting. American Pop thrived on the transformation of everyday reality into art, but Erró adopted this new language to display the contradictions inherent in a world of never-ending consumption. In Pop’s History, a landmark painting from 1967, Erró acknowledges his American colleagues and mocks the notion that Pop could have first surfaced anywhere but the U.S. In this key work, cartoonish, bearded Muscovites in fur hats frolic in the snow while excerpts from Pop classics—a Warhol Marilyn, a Wesselman reclining nude, an Oldenburg hamburger, for example—float above in balloons. In the 1960s, Erró also produced two experimental films, Grimaces and Concerto Mécanique, which will be screened in the exhibition at the Grey alongside the Surrealist-inspired assemblages and props he created for them.

Erró continued to develop his history paintings in the 1970s, including a series on American astronauts and works such as CIA KGB, 1974–75. In Chinese paintings, from 1974–79, another series, he inserts Mao Zedong or figures from Socialist Realist posters into stylized urban backgrounds, for example, New York or Chicago. It is a contemporary reprise of this series produced as lithographs—Mao visiting Venice—that are on view at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Center for International Affairs.

Later, in the 1980s and ’90s, Erró filled every inch of his canvases with brightly colored cartoon and comic-book figures, all vying for our attention. Exemplifying this abundant, horror vacui approach to painting is the Femmes Fatales series. In each painting in this series, female figures abound—nuns, women warriors, television superstars, historical characters, and, most prominently, comic-book super heroines, such as Wonder Woman, Red Sonja, and Tank Girl. Here Erró simultaneously employs and undermines clichés, creating scenarios where women always reign supreme.

Erró has always worked in series, first creating collages that he then projects onto canvases and paints. He observes, “Assembling the collage is the most enjoyable part of the work. It offers the most freedom. It is almost like automatic writing. Here you discover formal solutions to filling the surface. The collage is simultaneously an original and a model. Then it’s just a matter of locking yourself up in the studio, sometimes for 15 hours at a stretch.”

Erró has shown prominently in Europe, including a 1999 solo exhibition at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.  His work has been included in many exhibitions centering on postwar art in Europe, for example, “Made in France” in 1997 and “Les Années Pop” (The Pop Years), both at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 1989, Erró donated over 3,000 works to the city of Reykjavik, and in 2001, a selection from the Erró Collection was featured at the Harbour House, a recently opened branch of the Reykjavik Art Museum. “Erró’s gift to the Reykjavik Art Museum is one of the largest ever given to an Icelandic museum,” notes Eirikur Thorlaksson, director of the museum and co-organizer of the exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery. “It is part of our mission to help shed more light on Icelandic culture, and the Erró Collection is providing one means to do so.”