Gardar Eide Einarsson

An increasingly peripatetic artist, Einarsson, born in Oslo, now splits his time between New York and Tokyo. Appropriative acts comprise the majority of his artistic practice. Through re-contextualisation, he endows adopted elements of cultural ephemera with a political charge, attempting to transform a battery of neutral art materials into signifiers of dissent. His sources are varied, ranging from book cover graphics, to institutional architecture, to mail-order catalogues, police instruction manuals and everyday objects. Rendered in the artist’s strict black-and-white palette, they all undergo a translation into his particular artistic vocabulary, becoming, in effect, his stolen intellectual properties. These works reflect identity-related tensions within the mass culture. However, it is not merely a question to consider these as proper works of art. Above all, thanks to an elaborate display, the artist encourages us to question what would be the status of a Post-Modern artwork as a critical and independent tool.

The Devil’s Butcher Shop; the New Mexico Prison Uprising, is a painting based on a book cover relating to one of the most violent prisoner riots within the American history. By using a graphic treatment, the artist reveals a purely abstract picture in complete opposition to reality. Thus, behind these typical modern abstract paintings, is hidden a reality more violent and largely offset by the artist.