Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Gardar Eide Einarsson. Comprised of large-scale paintings, silkscreens, and sculptures, this is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery.

Einarsson uses visual signs and symbols taken from a variety of sources ranging from popular culture to political iconography to utopian ideologies and criminal subcultures. By decontexualizing and appropriating the images or objects using techniques such as enlarging them, separating them, and combining them with a calculated restraint, Einarsson makes them virtually void of their original meaning, creating works that are sophisticated and cynical expressions of coded and layered messages dually referencing the exercise of power and resistance to such. This imagery is combined with a formal vocabulary of minimalism and geometrical abstraction, often through the use of a monochromatic palette or rigorous black-and-white execution, as well as other references to movements in art history such as the readymade, pop art, and conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s.

For this exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, a suite of four new monochrome paintings from the artist’s Fluorescent Pink series will be presented. Titled after the shade of acrylic paint that has been used to make them, these works with fluorescent pink surfaces that occupy almost the entirety of the canvas, reproduce the high modernist ideal of monochrome painting while also exploiting the possibility of the monochrome as a background for the visual and textual fragments found throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

Also on view will be a large-scale diptych silkscreen painting with the motif of an American postage stamp as well as a steel sculptural work that alludes to pull-up bars found inside American prison cells. Central to these works is an investigation of the fundamental conflict within a control society such as that of post-9/11 America as well as the mythology and history of the individual as an outlaw figure, as hinted to in the exhibition title, a quote from the anarchist character played by Klaus Kinski in the 1965 film Doctor Zhiwago.

This exhibition marks the second time for the artist’s work to be shown at Rat Hole Gallery following a two-person exhibition with Oscar Tuazon in 2010. A monograph of the artist’s Stainless Steel (Fine) and Fluorescent Pink painting series will also be published by Rat Hole Gallery to accompany the exhibition.

Courtesy of Rat Hole Gallery