Erró

The painting Silver Sable Saga is about a comic heroine presented by the publishing house Marvel Comics, created in 1985. Silver Sable, her real name being Silver Sablinovia, is an international mercenary, polyglot, coming from Simkaria, an imaginary country located in Eastern Europe. She is the CEO of an organization that specializes in hunting down Nazi war- criminals. According to legend, her hair grew white when she, as a child, witnessed the murder of her mother during a terrorist attack. And then Silver Sable decided to fight crime and become a fearless killer. She has no superpowers, but she is a master in hand-to-hand fighting and highly skilled in using cold steel and fire-arms. Her costume is reinforced by Kevlar and protects her from bullets.

Beautiful and bellicose, Silver Sable enters a long list of the Amazons and femmes fatales that have inhabited my artistic universe from the early eighties. She is a symbol of courage, strength and independence, Joan of Arc of the 20^th century; emancipated from all the obligations and  constraints imposed to women by tradition, directly appropriating the phallic attributes of the male sex, she conducts missions of the highest importance to the entire world.

Born Guðmundur Guðmundsson, Erró ranks among the major figures on the international avant-garde scene of the 1960s. His name is associated with the renewal of pictorial figuration, the Happenings movement and the new wave of experimental cinema. Although he is often attached to artistic groups like Surrealism, Narrative Figuration or Pop art, his work cannot be reduced to any of them.

Erró studied art in Reykjavík, Oslo, Ravenna and Florence, before settling in Paris in 1958. He has lived in France, Thailand and Spain for most of his life. He travelled for the first time to USA in 1963 and to URSS in 1965. Erró has exhibited all over the world, representing Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and has received many grants and awards. His work features in numerous museums and private art collections. In 1989 he donated a large collection of his works to the Reykjavík Art Museum.