Ragnar Kjartansson

Biography

In 2009 the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Biennale turned into a studio. For six months Ragnar Kjartansson painted, seven hours a day, a portrait of a young man in nothing but swimming trunks, smoking and drinking beer against the backdrop of the Grand Canal. The finished canvases stayed in the same studio. The work was called “The End”.

He was born in 1976 in Reykjavík. His mother, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, is a well-known Icelandic actress, and his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, a director and playwright. He was named after his grandfather, the sculptor and ceramicist Ragnar Kjartansson. He grew up among theatre people and in his youth played in various bands. The best known of them, Trabant, played electronic pop and rock and was famous for its flamboyant concerts.

In 2000 he studied as an exchange student at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and in 2001 he graduated from the Iceland Academy of the Arts. In 2000 he also began “Me and My Mother”: his mother spits in his face on camera, and the filming is repeated every five years. She later wrote that it is hard for an actress with a fifty-year career to spit on her own son, and that the project was possible only because of the love and respect they have for each other.

His first notable performance was “Death and the Children” (2002): in a black cloak he walked through a cemetery with children from a summer camp and talked with them about death and fate. In 2005 came “The Great Unrest”: for three weeks he played the blues every day, dressed as a Viking, in an abandoned village theatre. In 2006 “Sorrow Conquers Happiness” appeared, which has a second title, “God”. Accompanied by an orchestra, he repeats one phrase for many hours: “sorrow conquers happiness”. In 2014, at Manifesta in Saint Petersburg, it was performed in the Picture Hall of the Vitebsky railway station: the words were translated into Russian, and the Saint Petersburg ensemble Synergy Orchestra played with him for seven hours. The phrase is ambiguous in both languages, and I think that is the whole point: from hours of repetition one cannot tell who is overcoming whom.

In 2007, at Rokeby Farm in New York State, he spent two days filming himself as a plein-air painter beneath blossoming trees. “The Visitors” was filmed on the same farm a few years later. The title comes from the last album by the Swedish band ABBA. The work was commissioned by the Migros Museum in Zurich and was one of the museum’s inaugural exhibits; for the artist it was his first solo show in Switzerland. The song was written by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, then the artist’s wife. Musicians and friends perform it simultaneously but separately, in different rooms of a house and outdoors. Each is shown on one of nine screens, and on one of them is Kjartansson himself. The work then went to the Guggenheim in New York, to The Broad in Los Angeles, and to Montreal, Boston, Washington, Nashville and San Francisco.

In 2013 he showed “SS Hanover” at the Venice Biennale, to which he returned after 2009. That same year, at the Malmö Museum of Modern Art, he built a wooden shed with an eleven-metre neon sign reading “Scandinavian Pain”. Inside hung forty paintings by Edvard Munch, and at the opening ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” was performed. On 5 May 2013 at MoMA PS1 in New York the band The National played its song “Sorrow” 99 times in a row over six hours; the project was called “A Lot of Sorrow”. He has also been asked why his art is so melancholic. He answered that life is sad and beautiful, and that he loves both life itself and its hopelessness.

In 2014, together with Kjartan Sveinsson, formerly the keyboardist of Sigur Rós, he made “Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen”, based on Halldór Laxness’s novel “World Light”, with the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin, the Film Choir Berlin and the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg. In the same year Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary commissioned from him and a group of twenty friends, artists and musicians the two-part project “The Palace of the Summerland”.

Solo exhibitions took place at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015), at the Barbican Centre in London and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (2016), and at the New Museum in New York (2014). In 2019 the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed his seven-channel video installation “Death Is Elsewhere”, and in 2023 the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk held the exhibition “Epic Waste of Love and Understanding”. He received the Malcolm McLaren Award from the Performa festival (2011), the Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award of the Artes Mundi prize (2015) and the Ars Fennica Award (2019). In 2016 Reykjavík named him its City Artist.

In 2022, at GES-2, the arts centre in Moscow, he was remaking the television series “Santa Barbara”; after the war in Ukraine began, the project was closed.