Gardar Eide Einarsson

OSCAAR MOULIGNE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Gardar Eide Einarsson, entitled “Ride of the Valkyries” Continues, on view from September 7 until November 23, 2024. The exhibition will present a body of recent paintings and sculptures for the first time.

Einarsson is known for his works that examine the complex relationships and hierarchies of authority existing within social, political, and economic structures. Across a multitude of genres—from painting, sculpture, collage, silkscreen, and installation—and with various approaches including appropriation, assemblage, and abstraction of preexisting images, he constructs unsettling narratives that explore how and when individuals are driven to question the establishment. By examining and dissecting cultures, histories, identities, and the relationships between them, Einarsson addresses universal fears and conflicts that lie hidden or suppressed beneath the surface of the seemingly mundane everyday.

Often found in the artist’s work are visual signs and symbols taken from a variety of sources ranging from popular culture to political iconography to utopian ideologies and subcultures. By decontextualizing the images or objects, Einarsson makes them virtually devoid of their original meaning, creating works that are sophisticated, coded expressions—typically with elements of cynicism and humor—dually referencing the exercise of power and resistance to such. This imagery is combined with a formal vocabulary of Minimalism and geometric abstraction, often through a single color or rigorous black-and-white, as well as other references to art history such as the readymade, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art of the 1960s and ’70s.

In the paintings and works on paper on view in the exhibition, the source material Einarsson has used is closed-captioning text from various films and TV programs ranging in genre from war to science fiction to stand up comedy. These phrases, originally referring to vocal gestures, sounds, background noise, and musical cues on screen, are taken out of their context and placed onto a monochromatic black field. In doing so, Einarsson creates a void where visual imagery is missing, leaving the viewer to engage with nuances of intense emotional and psychological situations experienced through written language. While some are poetic descriptions as if to depict a calm before the storm, others comprise prophetic narratives that serve as a catalyst for notions of paranoia, psychoanalysis, and the unknown.

Also on view is an installation of readymade sculptures of Bitcoin mining rigs—steel-frame devices no longer prevalent in use—that have been powdercoated in a palette of RAL colors (a German color chart which enumerates colors for industry and commerce), taken from sketches found in the notebooks of Donald Judd. Demonstrating a contemplative contrast to the monochromatic paintings in the exhibition, Einarsson’s multicolored sculptures contain both formal and conceptual references to Minimalism and its use of outmoded relics of industrial production. In exploring the ideological and once-utopian era of cryptocurrency, Einarsson’s new works bring attention to the extreme velocity of technological obsolescence in contemporary society, silently alluding to an uncertain present and the fundamental upheaval of systems of control.

About the artist

Gardar Eide Einarsson was born in Oslo, Norway in 1976 and currently lives and works in Tokyo. He received his education from the National Academy of Fine Art in Bergen, Norway; Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Whitney Independent Study Program in New York; and Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York.

Einarsson’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including solo museum exhibitions at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Astrup-Fearnley Museum in Oslo; Bergen Kunsthall; Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm; Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; The Fridericianum in Kassel; Kunstverein Frankfurt; The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth; and the Reykjavik Art Museum. The artist has also participated in the Whitney Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Sydney Biennial, among others.

Einarsson’s work is represented in a number of public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MoCA), Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Museum for Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (MMK), Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Malmö Art Museum, Malmö; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo and the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Oslo.