GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON

Born 1976 in Oslo, Norway. Lives and works in New York, USA.

Gardar Eide Einarsson, Liberty or Death, 2006, cotton and grommet, 150 x 250 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

Gardar Eide Einarsson makes works that combine particular stylistic approaches with highly charged source material. He works in a range of media, from painting to text works and from light boxes to installation. A distinct black-and-white chromatic aesthetic with strong graphic and pop-influenced techniques is particularly present in his paintings and text-based works.

Much of his work focuses on language, in particular on the distilled and sharp morsels of meaning found in slogans, speech bubbles and logos. His work is provocative and suggests a potentially nihilistic world-view. Phraseology borrowed from the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s is rendered in aluminium speech bubbles or in bold fonts on light boxes. Although a lot of his works have a raw, unpolished finish, with drips and torn flags, Einarsson is meticulous about the production of these effects, using computergenerated stencils and other techniques. There is ambiguity in the presentation of much of Einarsson’s material, which combines an austere visual elegance with a self-conscious acknowledgement that he is flirting with the problematic style of ‘radical chic’.

In his works, he has referenced a range of icons from the last few decades of American counterculture, based, for example, on material from the infamous Manson Family or on recasting a line from a play written by Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. A wall painting of the logo of underground record label SST is subtitled Sic Semper Tyrannis, in Latin ‘thus always to tyrants’ – a phrase shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln and a favourite of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Einarsson shows a similar fascination with the visual language of comic books and has often used speech bubbles and comic typefaces to produce bold statements on gallery walls. In another work, he bleeds all the colour out of the iconic Captain America shield, rendering it entirely in either monochrome black or white.

Einarsson demonstrates a research-based approach that, when combined with a distinct and studied aesthetic, reveals ambivalence and irony at the heart of a seemingly politicised art. For the Biennale, he will produce a new series of flags based on the Romanian revolutionary flag of 1989; a revolutionary symbol created by simply cutting out the coat of arms of the Romanian Socialist Republic from the official state flag, leaving a gaping hole. ‘The flag with the hole’, as it was known, was a visual embodiment of revolutionary action; a mnemonic coup d’état that took the state out of the nation. These flags relate to previous ones that the artist branded with fighting words such as ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘Come and Take It’, which echo the sentiments of nationalism and revolt. These, like all of Einarsson’s works, rely on the viewer’s recognition of a familiar format or icon and the attendant uneasiness that comes when that object or language is stripped of colour, context and usual meaning.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA
2009 ‘DOG WHISTLE POLITICS ’, Nils Stærk, Copenhagen, Denmark
2008 ‘South of Heaven’, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland
2008 ‘I Am the Master of My Fate’, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri, USA
2007 ‘Südlich des Himmels’, Frankfurter Kuntsverein, Frankfurt, Germany

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Listen Darling … The World is Yours’, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
2008 ‘Listen Darling … The World is Yours’, Ellipse Foundation Art Center, Lisbon, Portugal
2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
2008 ‘That was then … This is now’, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA
2007 ‘Bastard Creature’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

Selected Bibliography

Steffan Boije af Gennäs, ‘Gardar Eide Einarsson’, Frieze, March 2007
Katya García-Antón and Chus Martínez (eds), Gardar Eide Einarsson: South of Heaven, exhibition catalogue, Revolver, Germany, 2007
Ana Finel Honigman, ‘Gardar Eide Einarsson’, Tema Celeste, September–October 2005
Kate Sennert, ‘Gardar Eide Einarsson’, Tokion, April–May 2007
Skye Sherwin, ‘Black on Black’, ArtReview, January 2008