Ragnar Kjartansson (performance artist)
Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976 in Reykjavík)[1] is an Icelandic performance artist.[2]
Early life
Kjartansson (his name is pronounced RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun)[3] was born in 1976 in Reykjavík, where he still lives today.[4] His mother, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, is a well-known actress in Iceland and used to perform with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, now a director and playwright.[5] He is a former member of the Icelandic band Trabant.[6]
Work
Kjartansson trained as a painter at the Iceland Academy of the Arts,[3] but soon concentrated on performance art. In a 2002 work called Death and the Children, he dressed up in a dark suit and carried a scythe, leading young children — who had no idea what the costume meant — through a cemetery, trying earnestly to answer their questions about fate. In his 2006 live performance Sorrow Conquers Happiness, captured in the video God, he wore a tuxedo and played the role of an 1940s nightclub crooner on a pink-draped stage with an orchestra, singing, “Sorrow conquers happiness” over and over as the music swelled.[3] That same year, in his two-day piece The Blossoming Trees Performance, he assumed the role of plein-air painter in the mode of the Impressionists or Hudson River School artists at Rokeby Farm, a nearly 200-year-old house in the Hudson Valley.[7]
Kjartansson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2009, claimed to be the youngest artist ever to do so.[1] For his exhibition at Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa near the Rialto Bridge, the artist relentlessly painted the portrait of fellow Icelandic artist Páll Haukur Björnsson who poses before him in a black Speedo, cigarette and beer in hand.[3]
In 2011, Kjartansson won the inaugural Malcolm Award at Performa 11, the visual art performance biennial.[8] He won for his 12-hour work Bliss, which was performed without a break at the Abrons Arts Center involving repeated performances of the denouement of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”, the moment when the count gets down on one knee and asks his wife for forgiveness, which she grants in an aria. Kristjan Johannson, an Icelandic tenor, played the count, with members of his master class in the other roles.[9]
Kjartansson's six-hour video A Lot of Sorrow shows the indie rock band The National onstage before a live audience in the VW Dome at MoMA PS1 in May 2013; in front of up to six cameras that constantly provide different views, the band plays its popular lament, Sorrow, roughly 3:30 minutes, for six hours.[10]
For a 2015 Creative Time in New York's Central Park, Kjartansson created S.S. Hangover: in a square-sailed boat resembling a Viking ship, a formally attired brass sextet plays a beautiful composition as the vessel slowly motors around Duck Island in the Harlem Meer.[11]
Exhibitions
Kjartansson's work has been exhibited widely. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna. Song, his first American solo museum show, was organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2011, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.[12]
In 2014 Kjartansson was shortlisted for the Artes Mundi prize, exhibiting his nine-screen video work, The Visitors, at the Turner House Gallery, Penarth, Wales.[13]
The Visitors was exhibited at the inaugural exhibition at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles in September, 2015.[14]
Kjartansson is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York and i8 Gallery in Reykjavik.
Literature
- Ragnar Kjartansson: The End, Christian Schoen (ed.), Ostfildern (Hatje Cantz) 2009, ISBN 978-3-7757-2333-6
- Icelandic Art Today, (Ed. by Christian Schoen and Halldór Björn Runólfsson), Hatje-Cantz, Ostfildern 2009 ISBN 978-3-7757-2295-7
References
- 1 2 "Venice Preview: Ragnar Kjartansson". Art in America. 2 June 2009. Retrieved 27 January 2015.
- ↑ Ragnar Kjartansson - 'The Visitors' - NYTimes.com 21 Feb 2013 "Bonhomie and nihilism go hand in hand in “The Visitors,” a recent video installation by the talented performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson."
- 1 2 3 4 Randy Kennedy (June 3, 2009), Over and Over: Art That Never Stops New York Times.
- ↑ Ragnar Kjartansson Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.
- ↑ Hilarie M. Sheets (January 2, 2013), Never Tiring of Repeating Himself New York Times.
- ↑ "Off the Wall: 2011 - An Evening with Ragnar Kjartansson and Friends". Warhol. Retrieved 11 January 2011.
- ↑ Hilarie M. Sheets (January 2, 2013), Never Tiring of Repeating Himself New York Times.
- ↑ Felicia R. Lee (November 22, 2011), Ragnar Kjartansson Wins Performa Award for ‘Bliss’ New York Times.
- ↑ Roberta Smith (November 19, 2011), A Magical Musical Moment, Extended to 12 Hours New York Times.
- ↑ Roberta Smith (September 18, 2014), A Concert Not Live, but Always Living: Six Hours of the National in ‘A Lot of Sorrow’ New York Times.
- ↑ Ken Johnson (May 21, 2015), Review: ‘Please Touch the Art’ and ‘Drifting in Daylight,’ Outdoor Art at the Parks New York Times.
- ↑ Ragnar Kjartansson Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.
- ↑ Crichton-Miller, Emma (13 November 2014). "Artes Mundi: international art in Cardiff". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
- ↑ "The Broad, New Contemporary Art Museum In Los Angeles, To Open To The Public September 20" (press release). The Broad. 5 February 2015.
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