Ragnar Kjartansson, Sunday Without Love (2025). © Ragnar Kjartansson; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
“Ragnar Kjartansson: Sunday Without Love“ at Luhring Augustine Through December 20, 2025
Wry pastoral yearning is the overarching vibe of Ragnar Kjartansson’s newest exhibition, Sunday Without Love, on view at Luhring Augustine through December 20. The eponymous single channel video work, the only piece on view, features the artist and his collaborators making music in an unnamed European countryside, wearing folk costumes. They chant “You must learn to live without love,” a line adapted (by the artist and collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson) from a comedic 1996 song by German artist Rocko Schamoni. What’s funny about learning to live without love? If comedy is tragedy plus time, then repetition and duration can seem like an invocation towards humor, away from grief. The bonnets also help, as does the incongruity of the scene. A mid-twentieth century postcard offered Kjartansson a template for his performance. It featured a historical tableau, undermined in its era specificity by the presence of a jazz guitar.
Duration and repetition are indeed key to the work of the Icelandic artist. His multi-channel video installation The Visitors (2012) features the artist and his friends chanting one haunting line, again and again, in a house upstate. Kjartansson himself strums a guitar in the tub. A 2013 performance at MoMA PS1 featured The National playing the same song, “Sorrow,” for six hours. Every five years since 2000, the artist has recorded his mother spitting in his face while the pair stand in front of a bookshelf. Throughout these works, Kjartansson always seems to be having fun. The mood is contagious.
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