Power Under Construction - Gardar Eide Einarsson

Honor Fraser is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Gardar Eide Einarsson. This exhibition, entitled Power Under Construction will mark Einarsson’s second with the gallery.

Einarsson typically uses a restrained palette of black and white, which offers a more serial or even deadpan reaction to his oftentimes overtly political, anti-establishment and general sub-contexts of opposition. Like Kasimir Malevich, the suprematist painter known for his socially charged works, Einarsson’s work seems starkly minimalist yet there are undercurrents of a strong voice of opposition. Einarsson’s aesthetically restrained compositions do borrow from a constant series of appropriated media, news headlines, explicit messages, underground subcultures and the criminal world. These subject matters offer a sort of punk viewpoint and suggest insurrection of establishment via lack of sentiment. Looking at advertising and propagandistic technique throughout mass media the artist reappropriates text and word play and recontexualizes meaning and public beliefs and so forms an ambivalent window into skepticism of authority.

Einarsson’s previous exhibition at Honor Fraser, All My Friends Are Dead, included inkjet prints on plywood of reproductions of nine images from a 1960s police instruction manual. 

Born in Norway, Gardar Eide Einarsson lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited in solo shows in Oslo, Berlin, Köln, Paris and Copenhagen as well as the United States, and in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. More recently he has exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland, and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Norway. Einarsson’s work is included in the Rubell Family Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles collection, the Jumex Collection, the Norwegian National Museum of Art collection, and the Museum Moderne Kunst Frankfurt. In Summer 2011 he will curate a group exhibition of punk-themed work at Honor Fraser.

January 8, 2011 — February 12, 2011