Ragnar Kjartansson

17 September - 29 January 2023
work in collection

The Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (1976) works with every conceivable type of medium – from large-scale video installations, performance and ceramics to painting, theater, opera and pop music. All of them appear in Time Changes Everything, a unique and current retrospective of Kjartansson's work, his first in the Netherlands. Endurance, clichés and a deeply romantic yearning are recurrent themes throughout this.
The exhibition includesa series of diverse worksin which the artist expands time to nearly religious proportions by way of mantra-like repetitions. Its range extends fromthe both exuberant and subdued performance 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 Venice Biennale. Also on view are at least six different video works, among them the poetic No Tomorrow (2017-2022). This ballet for eight dancers with eight guitars – realized in collaboration with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and songwriter Bryce Dessner – was performed live in 2017 but is now, for the first time, being shown as a six-part video installation. As the viewer stands in the middle of the installation,the dancers slowly pass by while singing and playing their guitars; the sound emerges from thirty different sound channels. It is an ode to love, youth, music and beauty, an ode to the moment that we wish would last forever.

Kjartansson also developed, specially for De Pont, the new installation Guilt and Fear, which involved collaboration with a ceramic studio in Brabant.
Drawing on romantic philosophy and displaying a robust sense of humor and irony, Kjartansson touches on feelings about life and death, beauty and danger, complete submission and control: emotions familiar to all, where fears and desires are celebrated in a grand and compelling manner. The tragicomic undertone with which he ridicules himself at the same time allows the viewer to become completely immersed and leave feeling both charged and liberated.