Ivy Hickam

Blue Sky, Beetle Kill

Green Growth

Untitled, 2019

Stamped, verso, with estate stamp for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and created circa 1955. Provenance: Janet Ament De La Roche, from estate stamp verso. A cabinet sized, Pos...

Unique. Monotype on canvas. 1/1 ex. Signed,titled and dated at the verso. Artwork size: 83×102 cm. Frame size: 98 × 117 x 5 cm. Acquired directly from the artist. Free shipment worldwide. “I paint because painting is a private Utopia,” Erró writes of his art. The landscapes in Erró’s work are a constantly changing kaleidoscope of images, multivalent and mysterious, not infrequently controversial, bursting with life – and titillating, too! There is room in his pictures for both paradise and visions of fear. Erró is the alias of Gudmundur Gudmundsson, born on 19 July 1932 in Olafsvik, in north-western Iceland. Since Gudmundur first became enthralled by pictures of works of art in a catalogue from the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the tender age of ten, painting has been his passion and his mission in life. He was accepted into art school in Reykjavik as a 19-year old, subsequently complementing what he had learned there with further studies in Oslo. Erró travelled extensively in Spain, Italy, France and Germany in the 1950s, studying at the Florence Academy of Art in 1954 and at the School of Byzantine Mosaic Art in Ravenna in 1955. It was around this time that he began to exhibit his works, first and foremost in Paris, where he chose to make his home in 1958. During the 1960s he established contact with the Swedish museum director Pontus Hultén, who encouraged him and took him under his wing. Over the years Erró has taken part in hundreds of exhibitions and today his works are on show in museums all over the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Erró’s pictorial world is peopled by comic-strip characters and autocratic despots alike. Donald Duck with his Daisy, Chip & Dale, and other Walt Disney creations are unselfconsciously juxtaposed with Greek gods and madonnas. Elsewhere the German dictator Adolf Hitler stands shoulder to shoulder with his Iraqi counterpart Saddam Hussein...