Gardar Eide Einarsson’s series The Plague Drawings, all made in Tokyo during state of exception caused by the corona virus pandemic, uses as its indirect point of departure the present global situation by referring to Albert Camus’s literary principal work The Plague. Thus, Einarsson’s works on paper are based on the various book covers for the novel, which outlines a battle between humanism and cynicism – between idealism and political pragmatism. The original book covers produced over time are, in Einarsson’s works, reduced to modernist abstractions. The conceptual approach is the pivotal point in Einarsson’s practice, which addresses the tradition of new artistic departures – especially perhaps recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic work Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). By extracting all text and photographic elements from the book covers, Einarsson’s compositions put us in mind of open window sections. With all other information removed the work reclaims an abstraction originally conceived in painting and repurposes it as painting again, filling the void left by the missing referents with a new meaning. Both artistic approaches create value by erasing something significant, thereby making space for new meaning.


Gardar Eide Einarsson works with found and appropriated source materials in order to think about the images that surround us and the work they do to interpellate us. 

Ideas around personal liberty, belonging, inclusion/ exclusion and propaganda are explored with a view to what role culture plays in ideological systems and how artists and art institutions both are implicated in the dominant structures while at the same time perhaps offering a way around and outside them. How do we as individuals navigate the course between our own personal freedom and our inscription in the symbolic structure of the societies we exist within?

He addresses this subject matter through diverse media such as installations, paintings, sculptures etc. in a deadpan and often humorous way and with an awareness of the institutional context of contemporary art.