Christmas White House

Under the pseudonym of Erró, the Icelandic artist Gudmundur Gudmundsson casts a critical gaze over our contemporary world’s profusion of images. Following art studies in Reykjavik and Oslo, and later at the school of mosaic in Ravenna, he settled in Paris in 1958. He showed his work alongside the members of the Narrative Figuration group and took part in various major political events organized by artists, including such collective productions as the Great Collective Anti-Fascist Painting in Milan (1961) and the May Salon Mural, executed in Havana in honour of the revolution (1967). Erró created his sixty-work series “Chinese Paintings” between 1972 and 1975. Using Chinese Socialist Realist posters and cuttings from magazines, he recounts the fictional conquest of the Western world by Mao Zedong and his Red Guard. In Christmas White House, the artist combines superficial verisimilitude with narrative incongruity: a rather menacing Chinese communist soldier stands guard over a White House decorated for the festive season.