Erró: Portrait and Landscape. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
6. October - 8. January 2012
The Icelandic artist Erró is one of the great solitary figures of twentieth- century art. At once Pop and Baroque, eye-catching and narrative, critical of society and humorous, moral and inscrutable, over the past fifty years he has produced an opulent, unmistakable oeuvre that resists all categorization. His critical narrative collages reproduce in painting combinations of pictorial elements from various popular sources to create eloquent, often disturbing tableaux. As reflections on great social themes such as politics, war, sexuality, science, and art, these dense visual arrangements seem to create a comprehensive atlas of images of the modern world.
On the occasion of Iceland’s turn as guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the SCHIRN will show Erró’s series “Scapes” and, for the first time, the artist’s entire cycle of “Monsters” from 1968. This bizarre series of double portraits confronts the official likenesses of prominent persons with a second, monstrously distorted face. Erró films from the 1960s will be shown as a link between the two work groups.
Curator: Esther Schlicht, SCHIRN
Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
29. September - 8. January 2012
On the occasion of Iceland’s presentation as guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011, the SCHIRN will dedicate a solo exhibition to this country’s artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. Her approach is characterized by the use of a variety of media: drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures figure as prominently as installations and performances.
The artist assembles different cultural, religious, and psychological elements to unfold a unique aesthetical canon of signs, forms, and meanings. This becomes particularly evident in her videos whose surreal scenarios, which abandon all classical narrative patterns, confront the viewer with wondrous worlds: dream images interweave with stories from Norse mythology, elements of sexual psychology are associated with the sphere of spiritual exercises, things of the past merge with the present. In the work Gabríela Friðriksdóttir is conceiving for the SCHIRN, original medieval manuscripts of Icelandic sagas combine with the artist’s mysterious system of signs and a new film to a fantastic universe of its own.
Curator: Matthias Wagner K, Berlin
www.schirn.de
