Ragnar Kjartansson

Biography

Ragnar Kjartansson is an Icelandic artist, born in 1976 in Reykjavik, who grew up in a family steeped in theatre, the son of an actress and a director-playwright, an upbringing that continues to shape his multidisciplinary practice. He studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm before developing a body of work that spans durational performance, immersive multi-channel video installation, painting, and drawing. Much of his practice explores repetition and endurance, staging performances and recordings that unfold over many hours or even days, often blending deadpan humor with deep melancholy and a strong sense of theatricality. His best-known work, The Visitors (2012), is a nine-channel video installation filmed in a historic upstate New York house, in which musicians perform a single, repeating song from separate rooms simultaneously, creating an hour-long meditation on connection, loss, and collective performance. Kjartansson frequently draws on music, literature, and art history as raw material, restaging or reinterpreting familiar cultural forms to explore themes of love, longing, and the passage of time. His work has been presented at major institutions worldwide, including SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and numerous biennials, and he is represented by galleries including Luhring Augustine and i8 Gallery. Kjartansson remains one of the most influential contemporary artists to emerge from Iceland and the broader Nordic region.