On Tuesday, March 5, 2024, at 7 p.m., the grand opening of the exhibition of Icelandic artist Erró will take place at Petrović’s Castle. The opening will feature speeches by the director of MCAM,  Vladislav Šćepanović, and the exhibition curators, Maša Vlaović and Danielle Kvaran.

“The media virtualization of reality and the digitalization of life in global society have altered the epistemological perspective of humanity, depriving it of subjectivity, i.e., identity, and increasingly directing it towards programmed duties and obligations stemming from capitalist culture. Erró’s creativity is directed towards building a new, better society, in which art will have an important corrective social role,” wrote Vlaović in the exhibition catalog text.

Vlaović highlights Erró as one of the most renowned Icelandic artists, who has earned a significant place on the global art scene through his dedicated work and engaged approach.

“His art represents a form of social activism that opposes and critiques global capitalism, with the artist assuming the position of observer and critic of social movements, confronting the challenges of constantly questioning various phenomena. He is an engaged creator who, in a social and artistic sense, reacts and fights against the alienated world and consumer society, emphasizing primarily aesthetic, humane, and ethical values.”

Organized within a chronological-thematic framework, this exhibition encompasses Erró’s artistic career from the 1950s to his more recent works. The exhibition aims to demonstrate how Erró’s repertoire of sources has evolved over time to cover all possible areas, from art and cinema to comics, science and technology, history and politics, advertising and propaganda, or erotica, said exhibition curator Danielle Kvaran.

Kvaran also emphasizes that Erró draws inspiration from the globalized world and continuous flow of images and information.

“As a pioneer of painted collage, or the practice of painting based on assembled montages of finished images, he has developed a lush saga about consumer society and world politics, often with a critical or satirical intention. Through free combinations and contrasts of images from various printed sources and places, he has created a rich, complex, and often unsettling body of work that breaks down open cultural stereotypes and hierarchies, bridging past and present, fiction and reality. Pushing the art of collage to extremes, his original compositions articulate the flow of powerful visual narratives that have encompassed the ‘world stage’ long before the advent of the internet, which made globalization a central theme.”

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro and the Reykjavik Art Museum. The exhibition layout chronologically follows the phases of Erró’s work and his career, largely marked by the artist’s donation of 4500 works to the city of Reykjavik. Based on this donation, a significant part of the collection of the Reykjavik Art Museum was formed.

The exhibition will be held at Petrović’s Castle and House of King’s Guard of MCAM, and it will be open to the visit until May 6, 2024.