Ragnar Kjartansson
Ragnar Kjartansson, Margrét Bjarnadóttir, & Bryce Dessner, No Tomorrow, 2022, Six-channel video installation with sound, Duration: 29 minutes and 18 seconds. Commissioned by Sigurður Gísli Pálmason; based on a commission by the Iceland Dance Company. Courtesy of the artists, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
Ragnar Kjartansson: Time Changes Everything, the artist’s solo exhibition at the De Pont Museum, opens September 17, 2022 and runs through January 29, 2023.
Kjartansson works with multiple mediums – from large-scale video installations, performance, and ceramics, to painting, theater, opera, and pop music – and recurrent themes include endurance, clichés, and a sense of deeply romantic yearning. Time Changes Everything is a unique and current retrospective of the artist’s work, and his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
The exhibition includes a series of diverse works in which Kjartansson expands time to nearly religious proportions by way of mantra-like repetitions. The range of works on view extends from both exuberant and subdued performance such as Woman in E (2016), a woman in golden surroundings constantly playing the E-minor chord on an electric guitar, to the now classic series The End – Venezia, 144 oil paintings that Kjartansson produced as a performance during the 2009 Venice Biennale. Also included in the presentation are a range of video works, among them there is the premiere of No Tomorrow (2022), a six-part video installation with 8 dancers/musicians realized in collaboration with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and composer Bryce Dessner. Kjartansson has created another new work specifically for the De Pont exhibition, Guilt and Fear, an installation produced in collaboration with a ceramic studio in Brabant.
For more information about the exhibition, please visit the De Pont Museum's website.