RAGNAR KJARTANSSON - TIME CHANGES EVERYTHING

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON
TIME CHANGES EVERYTHING
17 September - 29 January 2023

De Pont Museum is delighted to announce the opening of Time Changes Everything,the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. The artist’s wide-ranging and internationally celebrated body of work — comprising performances and video installations, as well as painting, graphic work, and sculpture — occupies a unique position in the contemporary art landscape. This survey show at De Pont encompasses the full diversity of the artist’s oeuvre, presenting well-known pieces alongside new installations.
Though best-known now for his stunning video installations — Time Changes Everything features no fewer than five of these works — it was as a painter that Kjartansson first entered the international art world, when he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Over the course of his six-month durational performance, Kjartansson — smoking and drinking as he painted — made a new portrait each day of a male sitter wearing only a pair of Speedos. Displayed in the context of Time Changes Everything, the resulting series of 144 paintings tells the story of this now-classic performance that saw Kjartansson subvert the clichéd notion of the romantic macho male artist.

His work — shot through as it is with the artist’s enduring appetite for sublimity, his feminist outlook, and his love-hate relationship with romanticism — continually strives to strike a balance of extremes; of utter abandonment and ironic observation. Kjartansson’s work is simultaneously theatrical and contemplative, uplifting andmelancholy, appealing and terrifying, and it never fails to draw in the viewer.

All these qualities are to be found in Kjartansson’s most recent work No Tomorrow (2017–2022), a ballet for eight dancers and eight guitars that he made in collaboration with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and songwriter Bryce Dessner. His adapted version of the piece for this exhibition takes the form of a six-part video installation with 30 audio channels that make the music an almost physical experience. The viewer at the center of the installation sees the dancers — singing and playing guitar — glide by on the screens. It is a celebration of love, of youth and beauty, of the lightness of being, and of that moment one wishes would last forever.

TIMELESSNESS
The use of extended repetition as an effect recurs throughout the exhibition. To surrender to it is to be sucked into and then lost in a timelessness that sees narrative and action receding into the background. Bliss (2020), for example, is a live video recording of a 2011 durational performance in which the closing aria from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is sung continuously for 12 hours, immersing the viewer in a mesmerizing mantra of love and forgiveness that puts the stamina of the performers to the test. And in the contrasting, more subdued, performance Woman in E (2016), a woman repeatedly plays a melancholy E minor chord on an electric guitar — standing on a golden raised dais surrounded by a gold décor, she too holds her audience completely in her thrall. In this work Kjartansson is playing an ingenious game, deploying wit and playfulness to dispense with any notion of the woman being regarded as a model or object.

Kjartansson drew inspiration from the rococo paintings of Antoine Watteau for his nine-part video installation Scenes from Western Culture (2015), in which he presents at first sight lightweight imagery to confront us with the inescapable clichés of Western culture.

PERFORMER
The artist often takes a central role as a performer in his own work. His tragicomic video series Me and My Mother, for example, comprises live recordings of performances with his mother, actor Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir. Kjartansson started the work 20 years ago, and has repeated it every five years since then. It is an intensely personal and multi-layered piece about a mother-son relationship, about performance itself, and about endurance. This work is a cornerstone of the artist’s oeuvre, and last year De Pont acquired its fifth iteration, which will be displayed in the exhibition in combination with the preceding versions. The viewer watches on as the mother and the son grow older, and grow into roles that veer between steadfast determination and fragile vulnerability. In Guilt and Fear (2022), a major new ceramic installation that Kjartansson made in collaboration with a ceramics studio in the Dutch province of Brabant, the artist once again blends the emotional spices that are the essential and inseparable components of our existence.

Drawing on a keen sense of humor and irony as well as his ideas on romanticism, Kjartansson touches on feelings surrounding life and death, beauty and danger, control and complete surrender. These emotions, familiar to us all, form a playground of grand and compelling proportions for our fears and desires. The artist also deploys a tragicomic undertone to poke fun at himself, meanwhile, opening up a space for the spectator to become fully immersed, and to emerge both recharged and liberated.