NYAB Event - Gardar Eide Einarsson "Another Modern Moment Completed"

Gardar Eide Einarsson "Another Modern Moment Completed"

Team Gallery

This event has ended.

Reproduction as theft, and authorship as failed claim are the central conceits in this exhibition by Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson. His concurrent fascinations with criminality and appropriation come together in an installation that appears to mark the jettisoning of his overt approach to political subject matter in favor of a formalist's engagement with the legacy of modernism. Using the history of abstraction and pop as a readymade, Einarsson here distills a poetics of disruption, shifting between drippy hard edge abstraction, graphic renderings from mainstream sources, and the occasional deployment of the ben-day dot.

In preparation for this exhibition, Einarsson selected a number of images from the public domain that were of cursory interest to him: a book cover, the design on a napkin, a chain link fence, a section of the confederate flag, a comic book panel. He then set about transforming each of these pictures into an artwork. The stolen image became the property of the artist through gesture, labor, rendering. This project, however, has a secondary layer of appropriation for, after making each painting, Einarsson then immediately created another using the same image with a slight modification made through re-cropping or resizing. The "genuine" as embodied in the first painting is denied or, at the very least, called into question by the second. The drips, for example, become pastiche.