Ragnar Kjartansson

"Sorrow conquers happiness"
Performance, Installation, Video, Painting, Drawing

July 7 – August 5, 2006
Opening Friday, July 7, 2006, from 7 pm

 

Photograph taken of the artist in Greece 1988

Musik-Performance Two and a half days of 24 hour music performance at the opening weekend Friday, July 7th from 7pm until Sunday, July 9th midnight   “These times are dark. A sentence of defeat shouted in a room of people cheering. I never knew I would grow up to be such a mess of a man. Why do people loose it. That spark, that innocence. My mother has it though. She ain´t innocent but she has God!”                                               Ragnar Kjartansson, 2006

As of July 7th, Galerie Adler presents the videos and drawings of the young Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, for the first time in a solo gallery exhibition. The highlight of the show will be his performance "Raging Pornographic Sea" which will start on the night of the opening on July 7th, 7pm and run until midnight July 9th.
This show is built around a video where we see a crooner and a jazz band playing the “sadest music ever known to man” (Ragnar Kjartansson and Davíđ Ţór Jónsson). The artist investigates the limits of the physical realm. For this purpose, he employs an element familiar to the worlds of cinema and music: the loop. The music was especially written by Ragnar for the show at Galerie Adler. "Sorrow conquers happiness" also consists of an installation of drawings, paintings and sculptures Ragnar has worked on in Iceland and Russia. The gallery will be full of Ragnar Kjartansson´s world of defeat and beauty.
For his graduation show at the Academy of Arts in Reykjavík in 2001, Ragnar Kjartansson (*1976 Reykjavik) transformed a small room into a rococo theatre. The encounter, for visitors unexpected, with this place of illusion was, however, only the most immediate aspect that shaped Kjartansson’s work. The Opera primarily comprised a performance by the artist for four hours a day, ten days in a row: singing, acting, stunting - the opera became an endurance marathon and an astonishing physical challenge.
In Kjartansson’s works the imaginary element, in this case performed theatrically, collides with the hard, physical reality. There is no doubt here; the artist loves to slip into a variety of roles, to live out his different identities, whether as the singer of “Trabant” - one of Iceland’s major Pop groups -, as travelling troubadour Rassi Prump or even as other characters, the Grim Reaper for instance in his performance Death and the children (2002).

His continuous theatrical performance, staged at the Reykjavík Arts Festival 2005 in the ruin of the old Dagsbrún theatre, nestled within the majestic Icelandic nature, was named The Great Unrest. Kjartansson sits on the theatre’s old stage, dressed as a knight and surrounded by props. The knight, the romantic hero of sagas of old, sings - or, rather hums and shouts - a wordless Blues. He appears damned to regret the end of a great era. The monotonous Blues is used to express world-weariness in a world of emptiness. Visitors depart with a feeling of insecurity, leaving the artist alone in the building and his story.

Ragnar Kjartansson is a musician, an actor and an artist. As for his motivation, he says: “Art is for me like the Blues: I use it to purify my soul. Maybe I’m a romantic on a hungry pursuit for the ultimate art kick.” This is what distinguishes him: one who loves the show element, constantly slipping into new roles, changing his identities and realities, but basically always remaining authentic. Wherever Kjartansson is at any one time, his stage is.         


 

  
The Great Unrest, Performance und Installation Iceland 2005