Existing comment:
Over the past fifteen years, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (b. Reykjavik, 1976) has created an impressive body of work that brings together theater, music, literature, film, and painting. Resisting characterization by genre or medium, Kjartansson's work navigates extremes of high art and popular culture, sincerity and kitsch, playfulness and the depths of sorrow.
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Ragnar Kjartansson's work, comprising performance, stage sites, watercolors, and video installations spanning a period from his earliest days at the Iceland Academy of the Arts to the present. The exhibition highlights three recurring aspects of Kjartansson's work, beginning with Kjartansson's exploration of the creative persona as the artist dons various guises -- the Grim Reaper, a Hollywood crooner, a tortured poet, and a bohemian painter. Another facet on display is the profound role of theater in Kjartansson's work, with works incorporating live performance, painted scenery, and grand opera. The final installations emphasize the influence of personal relationships on Kjartansson's ar, in which his parents and friends, many of whom are actors and musicians, play key parts.
At a time when traditional boundaries are breaking down into new, more complex forms of expression, Kjartansson succeeds at both deriding and celebrating the romanticized figure of the artist. With each work, he takes us on a journey, eliciting sometimes paradoxical responses of excitement, boredom, bemusement, and sadness -- a panoply of emotions that mirrors the human condition. |