Frenetic may be too mild a word for describing the polemical style of Icelandic artist Erró (born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in 1932). A salmagundi of comic-book imagery and art-historical references thrown in a blender set to puree, his paintings fling bits of cartoon flotsam across the canvas as if they were Jackson Pollock drips edited by Mad Magazine founder, William Gaines.
Erró is currently featured in the Philadelphia Museum’s exhibition “International Pop,” which charts the worldwide spread of Pop Art during the 1960s. Much of it was galvanized by a love-hate reaction to postwar American culture, and the show here offers Erró as a prima facie case.
Tilting at numerous windmills for nearly 60 years, Erró has aimed his lance at consumerism, celebrity and geopolitics. Some of his gibes are obscure, but his relish for targeting the imperial decadence of the United States is not. Good Morning America (1992), for example, reprises American Gothic as a fever dream of superhero violence; Captain America (1988) allegorizes the schizophrenic dichotomy of our good-guy–bad-guy dominance of international affairs. Whether satirizing the U.S. or not, Erró envisions a world remade in the hegemon’s image as an idiocracy driven by cupidity, stupidity and self-delusion.