Opening Reception: June 2nd

The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents two major installations by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson: Scenes from Western Culture (2015) and Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt (2015), shown alongside preparatory watercolor sketches. The exhibition explores Kjartansson’s fascination with artifice, the sublime, Western dreams and norms, and French Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721).

Scenes from Western Culture is a collection of videos depicting a faintly absurd and occasionally ominous vision of Western life. Kjartansson draws inspiration from Watteau’s pastoral scenes of aristocrats enjoying various festivities, a style that coined the phrase fête galante.

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt features a series of free-standing paintings of snowy crags. The exposed plywood on the reverse side transforms the sculpture to a theater set. Translated as “only he who knows longing” from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt champions the sublime and the mundane as one.

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) is an Icelandic artist whose work in video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings play on the history of film, music, visual culture, and literature. His pieces are connected through humor and pathos, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. Kjartansson’s use of duration and repetition to harness collective emotion is a hallmark of his practice.