Ragnar Kjartansson – The End (man on jetty) (2009)

Louisiana Poster with the work, The End (man on jetty), 2009 published in connection with Louisiana's solo exhibition in 2023 with the Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976), Epic waste of Love and Understanding . Kjartansson has long since made his mark internationally as one of the most important voices in contemporary art, and Louisiana's exhibition includes both new and older works in a variety of media, from drawing and painting to performance and large, spatial works with film and music.

The motif here comes from Kjartansson's international breakthrough work, The End – Venice, 2009. The work consists of 144 portraits of a young man in Speedo swimming trunks, which Kjartansson painted during a six-month performance for the Venice Biennale in 2009, where he represented Iceland.

In the wake of the severe collapse of the Icelandic economy in 2008, the work became a counterpoint to capitalism's frenetic, masculine performance culture. Two young men in their prime spent six months hanging out, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, listening to music, reading, playing guitar.

Kjartansson tested the romantic matrix for a male painting genius and painted a picture every day of the undressed model, friend and visual artist, Páll Haukur Björnsson (b. 1981).

Kjartansson's emotional and political engagement with the world is reflected in his works. They contain his loving, humorous and critical dialogue with Western culture – our self-understanding, successes, clichés, failures, melancholy, confusion, hope and absurdities. Nuanced reflections on masculinity appear in both the work and the exhibition in a thematic range from existential pain to aggressive world politics, which also includes the Danish colonialization of the artist's homeland, Iceland.

The works vibrate ambiguously and precisely between existential and political seriousness and pop lightness. With Kjartansson, one usually has to both cry and laugh. The tension between tragedy and comedy is the artist's signature – for example in the work Me and My Mother from 2015, which many will know from the Louisiana collection.

At Louisiana, the exhibition with Ragnar Kjartansson follows on from major presentations by other key figures in the contemporary art field of multimedia practices, where performance, video, sound and other media are combined, such as Marina Abramović, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg and Arthur Jafa.