Ragnar Kjartansson
Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce the premiere of Sunday Without Love, a new single-channel video work by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Opening on November 1, and running through December 20, this exhibition marks the artist’s seventh solo presentation with the gallery and his first show in our Tribeca location.
Sunday Without Love is inspired by a mid-twentieth century postcard that lives on Kjartansson’s fridge depicting a scene of a group of people wearing matching folk costumes in a nameless location and, incongruously, one of them is holding a jazz guitar. Kjartansson, along with nine other performers, donned outfits to mimic this postcard and performed a fragile chorus on repeat in a similar idyllic, pastoral setting. The music was adapted by Kjartansson and frequent collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson from “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen,” a 1996 comedic song by German artist Rocko Schamoni. Set against the backdrop of the quiet, and deeply European, countryside the lyrics, “You must learn to live without love,” disrupt the bucolic mood with a feeling of tragic longing, endings, and stoic resignation. In a confluence of references from classical pastoral painting to traditional romantic ballads, the work evokes a portrait of unrequited love as well as a Buddhist sense of acceptance. The video Sunday Without Love was produced from a performance commissioned by TRANSART25, that was originally presented in Renon, Italy in September 2025.
Kjartansson, whose practice is deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater, often creates works imbued with the personal as well as irony and ambiguity. Repeatedly threading through his works, and evidenced in Sunday Without Love, are seemingly oppositional sentiments—humor with sincerity, romance with melancholy—that intertwine in a nuanced balance of contradictions and concordances. A defining characteristic of Kjartansson’s oeuvre is an ability to be at once empathetic and sardonic towards these strong emotions, and to simultaneously embrace the profound and the sincere while holding it at a distance.
Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. Major solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Reykjavík Art Museum; Barbican Centre, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington, DC; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among others. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale (2013), Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia (2014), and in 2009, he represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, The Netherlands; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Glenstone, Potomac, MD; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, among others. In 2026, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia will present solo exhibitions of Kjartansson’s work. In 2027, a survey show of the artist’s work will open at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain.