Maureen Paley is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Gardar Eide Einarsson at the gallery.

Gardar Eide Einarsson’s work incorporates acts of appropriation and the re-contextualization of imagery and information. He adopts and endows elements of cultural ephemera with a political charge, attempting to transform various materials into signifiers of dissent. His sources range from book cover graphics, mail-order catalogues, police instruction manuals, everyday objects and institutional architecture. The new exhibition will feature a sculptural installation made from oil drums and sand bags as well as a series of new paintings in acrylic on canvas where each finished painting has been silkscreened over with an image of a tarpaulin.

Tarps, oil drums and sandbags, (like duct tape and plywood), are the materials of a world of favelas, a planet of slums – enjoying a rich life repurposed from their original use, appropriated and re-contextualized as the ad hoc materials of DIY construction and destruction.

Tarps as a material of underground, illicit architecture. Tarps used to cover something in order to shield and protect it – but also to hide it from view. Silkscreened over paintings they cover the painting from view – shielding, protecting and withdrawing (bailing out an art that has become too big to fail) – erecting shelter.

Oil drums and sandbags are assembled as the empty, explosive-less husk of a vertical flame mine, (according to the instructions from Marine Corp Field Manual Nr. 3-11, “Flame, Riot Control Agents, and Herbicide Operations”). They become devoid of their actual explosive potential, inhabiting instead a sculptural and symbolic place.