Ragnar Kjartansson
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
June 09 – October 22, 2023

Friday 9 June, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark opens its big summer exhibition with Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976). The exhibition is the first retrospective presentation in Scandinavia of Kjartansson, who has long had a presence as one of contemporary art‘s essential voices having exhibited at leading art institutions all around the world.

EPIC WASTE OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING fills the museum‘s South Wing with a wealth of different media: painting, sculpture, performance and major spatial installations including film and music. A selection of the artist’s best-known projects is complemented by early works as well as entirely new ones created directly for the exhibition.

Kjartansson‘s emotional and political engagement with the world is reflected in the works. They embody his loving, humorous and critical dialogue with Western culture – our self-understanding, our successes, our clichés, failures, melancholy, confusion, hope and absurdities. A seam of nuanced reflections on masculinity runs through the work and the exhibition in themes spanning from existential pain to aggressive geopolitics, which also takes in Denmark‘s colonialization of the artist’s homeland, Iceland.

With precision, the works quiver ambiguously between existential and political gravity and poppy lightness, and with Kjartansson you usually have to both laugh and cry. The artist’s hallmark is the tension between comedy and tragedy – as in the work Me and My Mother, 2015, in Louisiana‘s Collection with which many visitors will be familiar.

At Louisiana, the exhibition follows major presentations of other leading multimedia practitioners within contemporary art at Louisiana, including Marina Abramović, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg and Arthur Jafa, all of whom combine performance, video, sound and other media.

more. www.louisiana.dk