ERRÓ exhibition at FIAA

The FIAA (Fonds International d'Art Actuel), based at La Visitation in Le Mans, presents an exhibition of Erró, real name Guðmundur Guðmundsson, a major figure of the Icelandic art scene and one of the most distinctive voices in narrative painting since the 1960s. Born in 1932 in Ólafsvík, Iceland, trained in Reykjavík, Oslo, Florence and Ravenna between 1949 and 1955, he settled in Paris in 1958 and developed a body of work that led to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1969), the Centre Pompidou (1975–1976, then 2010) and the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (2014).

The heart of his approach rests on a decision made in 1964: to stop inventing forms. Since then, Erró draws exclusively on existing images (comics, advertisements, political iconography, magazine pages), which he cuts out, sorts and assembles by theme before transferring them onto canvas. This collage process produces saturated compositions in which images of mass culture coexist without hierarchy with references to art history, in a style critics often call “baroque pop”: a bold profusion, at once satirical, critical and full of humor, that paints a teeming portrait of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

At the FIAA, the exhibition brings together 21 paintings, 11 original collages, and digigraphs and aquagraphs, mostly made between 2020 and 2023: a recent body of work that shows the constancy of Erró's gesture across more than sixty years of career. A 40-page catalog, published by Lelivredart, accompanies the exhibition.

On view May 22 to November 1, 2026, Tuesday through Sunday, 2–6 PM, at the FIAA Art Center, 1 rue Gambetta in Le Mans.