Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) is an Icelandic multidisciplinary artist and musician known for his performances and video works. Born in Reykjavík to a family of actors, Kjartansson graduated from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2001. His graduation piece was a sign of what was to come: he sang for four hours a day over a week and a half in a miniature theater he had built himself.

In Kjartansson’s work, the lines between art forms blur, and painting can be a performance, a performance a sculpture. Many of his works share a sense of duration and a use of repetition as a way of examining things. His best-known piece is The Visitors (2012), a nine-channel video installation in which eight musicians play the same song in different rooms of a New York mansion. Kjartansson was the youngest Icelandic artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and he received the Ars Fennica Prize in 2019.