Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1976 and continues to live and work there. Raised in a family of actors and directors, he studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His multidisciplinary practice combines performance, video, painting, drawing, theatre, and music, often drawing on the relationship between comedy and tragedy to explore repetition, duration, emotional vulnerability, and the Romantic sublime. Kjartansson gained international recognition through his durational performances and immersive video installations. In 2009, he represented Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with The End – Venezia, inhabiting the role of a bohemian painter and producing one portrait of his friend Páll Haukur Björnsson each day throughout the six-month exhibition. The resulting series comprised 144 paintings. His work frequently references Romanticism and the "banality of beauty" to examine the human condition. By approaching films as living paintings and performances as forms of sculpture, he creates situations in which irony and sincere pathos coexist. Throughout his career, Kjartansson has developed a distinctive visual language based on repetition, duration, and endurance. One of his best-known works, The Visitors (2012), is a nine-channel video installation filmed at the historic Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. It presents Kjartansson and a group of musician friends performing simultaneously in separate rooms of the mansion before eventually coming together. The work examines the "politics of sentimentality" and the communal power of music, balancing intimacy and separation, melancholy and celebration. His long-term collaborations and extended musical performances similarly explore the "melancholic joy" of artistic creation, transforming repetition into an emotionally and physically evolving experience. Kjartansson has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Barbican Centre in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Reykjavík Art Museum. He also participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and in Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Kjartansson received Performa’s Malcolm McLaren Award in 2011, the Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award at Artes Mundi in 2015, and the Ars Fennica Award in 2019. His work is held in major public collections internationally and continues to investigate how performance, music, art history, and personal experience shape collective emotion.