Gardar Eide Einarsson

Gardar Eide Einarsson (b. 1976, Oslo, Norway) is an artist whose practice explores the intersections of politics, subculture, and systems of social control. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, he appropriates existing images and visual languages to examine the relationship between personal freedom and institutional authority. Drawing on references to propaganda, counterculture, and the history of modernism, Einarsson's work challenges established structures of meaning and authorship. His practice is characterised by a deliberate ambiguity, in which questions of power, resistance, and ideology emerge through subtle shifts in familiar images and forms.

Not yet titled (baton 1-5) is a series of rephotographed illustrations from a manual instructing police officers on how to quell protests. The works depict a hand holding a baton in the act of striking protesters, highlighting the choreography and aesthetics of violence embedded in such law enforcement manuals.

The Myth of Sisyphus belongs to Gardar Eide Einarsson's series of paintings based on book covers. Although the surfaces are minimal and stripped back, they subtly evoke symbols of violence, politics, class struggle, and revolution. At the same time, a deliberate ambiguity remains, leaving the viewer with the sense that full access to the works' meanings is always just out of reach.

Reproduction as theft and authorship as a 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 overtly political subject matter in favour of a formalist engagement with the legacy of modernism. Drawing on the histories of abstraction and Pop Art as readymades, Einarsson distils a poetics of disruption, shifting between drippy hard-edge abstraction, graphic renderings from mainstream sources, and the occasional deployment of Ben-Day dots.

To prepare these paintings, Einarsson selected several public-domain images that held a passing interest for him: a book cover, the design on a napkin, a chain-link fence, a section of the Confederate flag, and a comic-book panel. He then set about transforming each image into an artwork. Through gesture, labour, and rendering, the appropriated image became the artist's property. This project, however, has a secondary layer of appropriation: after completing each painting, Einarsson immediately created another using the same image, modified slightly through cropping or resizing. The "genuine" quality 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 in the history of modernism, recalling the geometric vocabularies of artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Frank Stella, the graphic derivations of Pop Art associated with Roy Lichtenstein, and the mannered nihilism of Steven Parrino. In Einarsson's paintings, subtle distortions of form and painterly accidents usurp the authoritative stance traditionally associated with hard-edge abstraction. His project wilfully 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 calculated use of postmodern quotation, the works skilfully suggest, and perhaps even mimic, an in-depth engagement with a broader cultural field.