Part of what the artist Ragnar Kjartansson (Reykjavík, 1976) knows about the show he learned in the Church. Known for his use of repetitions in his audiovisual and performance installations, he often confesses that his art is deeply linked to his experience as an altar boy during his youth at religious liturgies. It was at that stage of his life when, as he confesses in several interviews, he was given the best advice of his life about art and entertainment: “If you make a mistake, make it look like a ritual.”
Ritual or not, it is indisputable that the Icelandic creator’s works, marked by simulation and staging, are characterized by the use of repetitions of the same act over a measured period of time. It sounds like liturgy. Kjartansson himself has stated on more than one occasion that this resource allows him to shape an action by repeating it over and over again, transforming it into a kind of living sculpture or painting. It is also a way of giving new meaning to the simplest words and actions. For example, when he decided to repeat the same song for six hours live as a living sculpture at MoMA PS1 as he had already done with the theme Sorrow junto a The National.
Not in vain, this peculiar artist who studied at the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Royal Academy in Stockholm, descends from a family directly linked to the theater —his mother is a popular Icelandic actress and his father a director and playwright— already In his pieces, he often mixes the pathos and humor of comedy and the most classic theater, in his attempt to convey a sincere emotion, a pure feeling without history.
A riddle to solve
Thus, as an artistic experience, these emotional landscapes that he tries to reconstruct with his pieces will give the title to the exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum that can be visited from February 22 to June 26. An exhibition that brings together for the first time four of Kjartansson’s most internationally recognized video installations, in addition to a series of watercolors by the artist, and which will be in charge of opening the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, the international art and promotion foundation created in 2002 by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.
“We couldn’t think of a more fitting way to celebrate 20 years of TBA21’s legacy of collaborating with artists to help them bring their most ambitious projects to life than to present an exhibition showcasing Ragnar’s incredible practice of breaking boundaries, which we have strongly supported for years”, celebrates the collector.
And it is that, as Björk sang in 1997: “Emotional landscapes / They puzzle me / Then the riddle gets solved / And you push me up to this”. Like pieces of that puzzle, like a riddle that makes sense, emotional landscapes, whose title is taken from this song by his compatriot, captures Kjartansson’s fascination with the United States, its landscapes and its music. From the Hudson River to the Rocky Mountains, blues or jazz give rhythm to this exhibition that takes advantage of the museum’s new installation dedicated to American Art in the Thyssen Collection to establish dialogues with paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“Experiencing his works in the context of American imagery at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza adds a dimension of resonance to his art”, shares Francesca Thyssen who states that, “after the success of the critical examination of the collection by Walid Raad , Ragnar’s exhibition will extend these conversations from a different perspective.”
When the arts dialogue
Highly influenced by art in all its forms and formats, his video installations, performances, drawings and paintings are also inspired by the history of cinema, music, visual culture and literature. “Kjartansson’s works are so monumental in size, materiality and subject matter that it is rare to experience them together”, adds the curator of this exhibition, Soledad Gutiérrez.
Music, staging and emotions go hand in hand in this exhibition that seeks to reflect on the human condition and “puts the works in dialogue with each other, showing new intersections and clearly revealing the romance between Kjartansson’s work and the iconic representations of United States”, continues its curator.
Starting with the most popular of his pieces to date, The visitors, whose title honors Abba’s latest album. Set at Rokeby Farm, next to the Hudson River, where it was recorded in 2012, this video installation shows how different artists or musicians, friends of Kjartansson, who also participates, perform the same song each in a space or moment, acting simultaneously but separately across nine screens for an hour. The lyrics, composed by the artist’s ex-wife, are simple and brief, but their meaning changes as the installation advances in the artist’s search for how the repetitive is modified and rituals are built.
From New York to the Canadian Rockies, The End (2009) is the scenario that the creator takes to question the romantic idea and its connection with the landscape. This performance will be installed together with the series of watercolors that, under the title From the Valley of World-Weariness in British Columbia (2011), from various collections, were painted in 2011 in the same place just after a fire, with the aim of conveying a certain hopeless nostalgia.
In the third of the proposals, Kjartansson, who is often part of his performances in his videos, gives prominence to an emblem of American blues. The man (2010) is the iconic portrait of one of Mississippi’s masters, Pinetop Perkins who, at the age of 97, by his piano placed in the middle of a vast desolate prairie, in front of some trees and an old barn, performs his repertoire in front of of the camera. Perkins, who died just a year after this video, after receiving his second Grammy for the album Joined at the Hipwas then one of the oldest active Delta blues musicians.
And if the blues is one of the American artistic expressions, so is the pop culture of the mid-twentieth century that it uses in God (2007), the last of his interventions, where the artist himself appears at the head of a jazz band of eleven musicians, directed by his collaborator Davíd Thór Jónsson in a thirty-minute video.
Three decades working together
Kjartansson, who has a 15-year relationship with TBA21, from whom he has received a number of commissions or co-commissions, including the performance The Palace of the Summerland in 2014, he has exhibited his work around the world. Currently it can also be visited in a large individual exhibition at the VA-C’s GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow that includes his original proposal Santa Barbarainspired by the homonymous soap opera from the United States, for which he will once again film 98 episodes in Russian in front of a live audience.
Other of his individual exhibitions and performances Recent ones have taken place at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Reykjavík Art Museum, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the New Museum in New York.
Throughout these years, the artist has received prestigious awards such as the 2019 Ars Fennica Award, the Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award in 2015 and the Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award. In 2009, Kjartansson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale, and in 2013, his work was featured in the Biennale’s main exhibition, The Encyclopedic Palace.
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