Time, Truth, and Other Immeasurables opens Fri, Sep 11. Image: L, 03 49 09.7, +24 03 12, 2017. Airbrushed pigment on canvas. Collection of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Church History Museum.
Time, Truth, and Other Immeasurables opens Fri, Sep 11. Image: L, 03 49 09.7, +24 03 12, 2017. Airbrushed pigment on canvas. Collection of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Church History Museum.
January 16–May 9, 2026
Love and Squalor takes its name from a short story by JD Salinger, which contrasts innocence with destruction. The title functions as an umbrella between two pieces by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, made ten years apart: Scenes from Western Culture: Burning House (2015) and the US Institutional debut of Sunday without Love (2025). Part-performance, part-film, the two works draw heavily on historic paintings of the idyllic pastoral landscape, which is then disrupted—in this case by fire or a hauntingly repeated lullaby.
Blurring the boundaries of mediums is a hallmark of Kjartansson’s practice. As the gallery Luhring Augustine explains, he approaches his “painting practice as performance, likening his films to paintings, and his performances to sculpture.” Music, cinema, painting, poetry, and performance all inform the artist as he interrogates beauty and the sublime. The resulting work evokes a powerful pathos—a stillness, a trance—that holds viewers in their durational experience long after the image fades.
Supported by Lauren and Tyson Call, Libby & Mark Haslam, National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Art, Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks Program, Utah Division of Arts & Museums, and In the Event
Ragnar Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums, creating video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that draw upon myriad historical and cultural references. An underlying pathos and irony connect his works, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. The artist blurs the distinctions between mediums, approaching his painting practice as performance, likening his films to paintings, and his performances to sculpture. Throughout, Kjartansson conveys an interest in beauty and its banality, and he uses durational, repetitive performance as a form of exploration.
Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. Major solo shows include exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; the De Pont Museum, Tilburg; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Reykjavík Art Museum; the Barbican Centre, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington D.C.; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; among others. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The artist received the 2019 Ars Fennica Award and was the recipient of the 2015 Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award and Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award.
