Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson auf MyArtSpace

With a family background in theater, Ragnar Kjartansson follows a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating elements of visual art, music and above all theater in his works. From this emerge happenings, installations, drawings, photographs, and videos. Kjartansson acts in many of his works as a protagonist, entering different roles: He made appearances as a knight, rock star, revolutionary, and even as the incarnation of death. As an artistic genius, obsessed with the search for the ultimate image, he caused quite a sensation at the Venice Biennale of 2009 during a six-month-long continuous performance at the Icelandic Pavilion.

The use of repetitions, time loops and the related themes of duration and endurance are at the core of Ragnar Kjartansson's work. His works express a feeling of sorrow and distress but also of the beauty, an emotion the artist seeks to reduce to one existential moment. Thus many of Kjartanssons's works are concerned with staging and enduring literary, musical or gestural moments of gripping emotionality and pure expression to the point of exhaustion. Thereby, the artist pushes himself and his audience to physical and psychological limits, suspending them in an ambivalent state of happiness and mourning, beauty and horror, humor and drama.

(Frankfurter Kunstverein)

important exhibitions from Ragnar Kjartansson

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Ragnar Kjartansson