Reproduction as theft, and authorship as failed claim are the central conceits in these paintings by Gardar Eide Einarsson. His concurrent fascinations with criminality and appropriation come together in a series of paintings that appears to mark the jettisoning of his overt approach to political subject matter in favour of a formalist’s engagement with the legacy of modernism. Using the history of abstraction and pop as a readymade, Einarsson here distils a poetics of disruption, shifting between drippy hard-edge abstraction, graphic renderings from mainstream sources, and the occasional deployment of the Ben-Day dot.

To prepare these paintings, Einarsson selected several public-domain images of cursory interest to him: a book cover, the design on a napkin, a chain-link fence, a section of the Confederate flag, a comic book panel. He then set about transforming each of these pictures into an artwork. Through gesture, labor, and rendering, the stolen image became the artist's property. This project, however, has a secondary layer of appropriation: after making each painting, Einarsson then immediately created another using the same image, with a slight modification made through re-cropping or resizing. The “genuine” as embodied in the first painting is denied or, at the very least, called into question by the second. The drips, for example, become pastiche.

Einarsson’s paintings reflect iconic movements from the history of modernism, recalling the geometric vocabularies of artists such as Kasimir Malevich and Frank Stella, the pop-graphic derivations of Roy Lichtenstein, and the mannered nihilism of Steven Parrino. In Einarsson’s paintings, subtle distortions of form and painterly accidents usurp the authoritative stance once required of hard-edged abstraction. His project willfully undermines the authority of these canonical movements, eschewing the purity of modernist abstraction in favour of a crafty rebelliousness. Einarsson’s interest in the historical lineage of political dissent is cunningly subsumed within the formal codes of his paintings. Through a rational use of postmodern quotations, they skillfully suggest (perhaps even mimic) an in-depth concern with a broader cultural field.