The painting Gods of the Lightning (Sacco and Vanzetti) is based on the cover of a 1929 publication about the trial of anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti. All textual information has been removed and the remaining graphic has been rendered in Einarsson’s binary, black/ white, paint/ no-paint technique. 

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were executed by electric chair in Charlestown State Prison in 1927 after a sham trial, are recurring characters in the oevre of Gardar Eide Einarsson, a case study of individual lives caught up in the political panic de jour and subsequently ground under the heel of the state apparatus.