Ragnar Kjartansson's solo exhibition, Time Changes Everything, will open at the De Pont Museum opens September 17, 2022 and runs through January 29, 2023.
Kjartansson works with every conceivable type of medium – from large-scale video installations, performance, and ceramics, to painting, theater, opera, and pop music – and recurrent themes include endurance, clichés, and a sense of deeply romantic yearning. Time Changes Everything is a unique and current retrospective of the artist’s work, his first in the Netherlands.
The exhibition includes a series of diverse works in which Kjartansson expands time to nearly religious proportions by way of mantra-like repetitions. The range of works on view extends from both exuberant and subdued performance such as Woman in E (2016), a woman in golden surroundings constantly playing the E-minor chord on an electric guitar, to the now classic series The End – Venezia, 144 oil paintings that Kjartansson produced as a performance during the Venice Biennale. Also included in the presentation are a range of video works, among them No Tomorrow (2022), a ballet for eight dancers with eight guitars. Realized in collaboration with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and songwriter Bryce Dessner, the piece was originally performed live in 2017, and has been remade into a new six-part video installation, which is on view in this exihibition for the first time. The artist is creating another new work specifically for the De Pont exhibition, the installation Guilt and Fear, which involves collaboration with a ceramic studio in Brabant.
