Ragnar Kjartansson

Kjartansson states: “This story has molded my approach to art more than anything else... It colored my whole worldview... World Light is an epic about the artist. An ironic tale of beauty and artistic integrity written in the crucible of modernism, it is equally an ode to beauty and a deconstruction of it. It speaks to an important 21st-century core: the politics of beauty. The exhibition will be the process of filming scenes from this novel, which depict the utopic creative moment, the search for perfection, and the final romanticized sacrifice for art. The exhibition space will become a Fellini-style studio, a mayhem factory for building, acting, and filming a story on beauty. We are not really making cinema; we are acting out an attempt to make cinema... It is like Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions.”

'The End’ (2009) features a tableau vivant of the artist and his model lasting for the entire six-months of the Biennale, along with a monumental video and music installation. It is presented in the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, a 14th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto.

In 2016 Kjartansson was honored as the year's Reykjavik City Artist. This is an honorary award, given to an artist who is believed to have excelled and made his mark on Icelandic art.

Kjartansson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland to Kjartan Ragnarsson and Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir. His mother is a well-known actress in Iceland and his father is a director and playwright. “[H]e grew up in the theatre—the Reykjavík City Theatre, where his father directed and his mother starred in a wide repertoire of classical and modern plays. He spent much of his childhood backstage, watching actors rehearse scenes or parts of scenes again and again, and he likes to tell people that he was conceived on stage, or almost—his mother told him that it happened a few hours after she and his father acted out a steamy sex scene for a film they were making. This was in 1975.”

commences the song by The National, whose music and lyrics repeatedly conjure notions of romantic suffering and contemporary Weltschmerz—themes Kjartansson often uses in his own work employing references as wide-ranging as Ingmar Bergman, the German Romantics, and Elvis Presley. As in all of Kjartansson’s performances, the idea behind A Lot of Sorrow is devoid of irony, yet full of humor and emotion. It is another quest to find the comic in the tragic and vice" versa.

In 2014 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) commissioned Kjartansson and a group of 20 talented artists, musicians, and friends to create the two-part project ‘The Palace of the Summerland’ Between the April 3 and April 27, the artist and his troupe of musicians, actors, artistic directors, costume designers, camera operators, and technical crew lived and performed continuously in the Augarten exhibition space, transforming it into an active studio, an art factory, and a set for a film and theatrical adaptation of the epic novel World Light, by the Icelandic author and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. The Palace of the Summerland is a piece of performance art, flirting with literature, music, and sculpture—a manic journey into the souls of generations of Icelandic artists, presented under the guise of making a film. Kjartansson describes the project as a “megalomaniac quest,” in this case to capture beauty, art, emotion, and the essence of life. Aiming at the impossible, it is a task that has to be tried, completed, lived. It was developed simultaneously with The Explosive Sonics of Divinity / Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen, a theater piece featuring stage paintings, performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the Film Choir Berlin and premiered at the Volksbühne in Berlin on February 19.

Kjartansson has had solo exhibitions at the Reykjavík Art Museum, the Barbican Centre, London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the New Museum, New York, the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is the recipient of the 2015 Artes Mundi's Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award, and Performa's 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award.

MoMA PS1 presented the durational performance, 'A Lot of Sorrow', by Kjartansson on 5 May 2013. "For the original work Kjartansson sought out US rock band, The National, to perform their song, Sorrow, repeatedly in a six-hour live loop. By stretching a single pop song into a day-long tour de force the artist continues his explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound.

The piece was originally shown at the Migros Museum in Switzerland, and premiered in the United States in early 2013 at the Luhring Augustine Gallery. The piece has since been displayed in several museums around the world, including The Broad in Los Angeles, The Guggenheim in New York City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Turner House Gallery in Penarth, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The piece returned to the Institute of Contemporary Art in February 2019. The piece came to the Dallas Museum of Art in September 2019. (https://dma.org/art/exhibitions/focus-ragnar-kjartansson)

The team assembled for this project was a robust group of some of Reykjavík's most prominent artists, comedians, writers, and musicians. It is a gang of the friends who have inspired him in his works. Beginning in April, they left behind their regular lives and joined Kjartansson on a Fitzcarraldo-like journey. They became The Palace of the Summerland by building it, acting it, and living it. Kjartansson's father, the theater director Kjartan Ragnarsson, was there to help direct the scenes, so there was even father-son tension. By visiting TBA21–Augarten at different times, the public experienced diverse situations: the team caught in the middle of a rehearsal; Kjartansson with his father introducing the timing of a certain scene; musicians rehearsing a score composed by Kjartan Sveinsson, the composer and former member of Sigur Rós; the production of sets, costumes, and props: literally the entire production process in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. “It will be a factory where we are building, acting, and filming an impossibly big story on beauty. The drama is on- site. We are making an epic on a softporn budget, surrounded by the audience. It is a hopeless task. A true disaster,” said Kjartansson.

From April 3 to April 27 (Wednesday to Sunday during opening hours and Saturdays until midnight), the musicians, actors, artistic directors, costume designers, camera operators, and technical crew lived and performed continuously in the Augarten exhibition space, transforming it into an active studio, an art factory, and a set for a film and theatrical adaptation of the epic novel. The venue served as the setting for a durational performance and work-in- progress in which the situation, process, and drama of each ephemeral moment are even more important than a final outcome. The public was invited to pay a visit and enter the situation, momentarily immersing itself in the scene and atmosphere and experiencing the adaptation and production of a tale of beauty and artistic integrity that has molded generations of Icelandic artists, including Kjartansson himself. Visitors were encouraged to spend time with the performance, to return and to maintain an engagement with the monthlong action. Following this four-week performance, the film/theater sets will become part of a large-scale environmental installation was on view at TBA21–Augarten between April 30 to June 8.

The Visitors is a 2012 installation and video art piece created by Kjartansson. Kjartansson named the piece for The Visitors, the final album by the Swedish pop band ABBA. The piece was commissioned by the Migros Museum in Zurich, and was one of the museum's inaugural exhibits. The premiere of the piece marked Kjartansson's first solo show in Switzerland.

In 2009 Kjartansson was selected as the official Icelandic representation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

The piece was filmed at Rokeby Farm, located in upstate New York, near Barrytown. Rokeby is a home and estate that at one point belonged to the Astor family, and later the Livingston family. The property is now inhabited by various descendants of both families, and other tenants. The property was the site of an earlier 2007 piece by Kjartansson, titled The Blossoming Trees Performance, during which he recorded himself as a plein-air painter for two days. The estate has also been used by other artists, due to the unique interiors of the main house on the property.

Kjartansson graduated from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2001 and also studying at the Royal Academy in Stockholm in 2000.

“Me and My Mother” began in 2000 while Kjartansson was still a student, and it is based upon a simple premise—every five years, Kjartansson invites his mother, the well-known Icelandic actress Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, to spit on him. Mother and son stand side-by-side in her living room facing a fixed-point camera. Periodically and repeatedly, Kjartansson's mother turns and spits into his face with dramatic gusto.

Ragnar Kjartansson ([ˈraknar cʰar̥tansɔn] ) (born 1976) is a contemporary Icelandic artist who engages multiple artistic mediums throughout his performative practice. His video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings incorporate the history of film, music, visual culture, and literature. His works are connected through their pathos and humor, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. Kjartansson's use of durational, repetitive performance to harness collective emotion is a hallmark of his practice and recurs throughout his work.

Laxness wrote World Light between 1937 and 1940, around the outbreak of World War II. The Palace of the Summerland, named after the second part of the novel, revolves around the tragic and fateful life of its protagonist, the folk poet Ólafur Kárason, whose constant search for sheer beauty and artistic grati cation leads to his nal tragic apotheosis.