Retrospective of the Year 2023

The Visual Arts Council’s prize for Retrospective of the Year 2022 is awarded to the exhibition Erró – The Power of Images, held in the Reykjavík Art Museum, Hafnarhús, 9 April – 29 September 2022. The exhibition was initiated on the occasion of the artist’s 90th birthday. It is the largest Erró exhibition in Iceland to date. It was curated by Danielle Kvaran, project manager of the Erró collection within the Reykjavík Art Museum, and art historian Gunnar B. Kvaran. The exhibition designer was Axel Hallkell Jóhannesson.

The exhibition covered Erró’s career from early on until the present time. Its title not only reflected the provocative imagery and turbulence which characterise the creativity of this dynamic artist and its expression in a flow of images that both signal and capture a multitudinous contemporary world, but it was also an apt choice for the scope of an exhibition which filled every nook and cranny of the building, so to speak. The exhibition was an impressive testimony to Erró’s extensive creative spectrum, in the form of paintings, graphic works, collage, experimental films, performances, sculptures and reliefs, while also including photographs from the artist’s career and other documentation. The exhibition provided a comprehensive and illuminating survey of Erró’s career, from his emergence in the European art world during the 1950s, where he was to make his mark on the avant-garde scene, experimenting with new forms of expression in the 1960s, until he came to shape and develop the narrative crucible of imagery for which he has long been best known.