Icelandic cool comes to Melbourne: NGV presents Ragnar Kjartansson’s first-ever Australian exhibition

Key works in the exhibition include his acclaimed nine-screen installation The Visitors, 2012, which was named by The Guardian as the best artwork of the twenty-first century. Filmed at Rokeby mansion in upstate New York, the work features the artist and various musicians from the Reykjavik music scene, performing a song with lyrics written by the artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. Each room of the ramshackle mansion hosts a different musician; a drummer in the kitchen, a banjo-player in the library, Kjartansson on guitar in the bath. Filmed in real-time, the work presents a melancholic house party that the artist has described as a ‘feminine nihilistic gospel song’.

The exhibition will also present the Australian premiere of the artist’s most recent work Sunday Without Love, 2025, a single channel video work inspired by a postcard on the artist’s fridge featuring people wearing matching folk costumes in a nameless, bucolic location. In response, Kjartansson and a cast of nine other performers are dressed in non-descriptive European folk costumes and sing the phrase ‘You must learn to live without love’. Drawing on classical pastoral painting and traditional romantic ballads, Sunday Without Love is a painting-as-moving image work that forces a confluence of references into sonic and visual harmony.

The juxtaposition of both tragedy and humour is another thread through Kjartansson’s work. In the ongoing video work Me and My Mother, every five years Kjartansson asks his mother, the acclaimed Icelandic actor Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, to spit on him. The resulting moving images capture dramatic pauses, sideways glances, grimaces and stifled laughter. The work is a video portrait of a relationship between mother and son, over time, each acting out their tragi-comic part.

Alongside Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy, the NGV presents the FREE children’s exhibition Children’s Play: Ragnar Kjartansson – the artist’s first ever exhibition for children. As the son of an actor and a theatre director, Kjartansson grew up surrounded by rehearsals, scripts and backstage activity. This world-premiere exhibition invites young visitors into a playful and creative space inspired by the theatre. Kids can be an audience member, an actor or a creator, inventing and performing stories with friends and family on stage. Taking inspiration from the theatre tradition of ‘dinner and a show’, the exhibition also features activity tables with lavish banquet-style displays of food. Arranged like still-life compositions, these displays invite children to draw what entices them or perhaps what they imagine they would like to eat. And for dessert: soft, colourful upholstered cushions, perfect for small hands to stack and turn into topsy-turvy cake sculptures.

Kjartansson has had major solo exhibitions at the Reykjavík Art Museum; the Barbican, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; and has represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale. In recognition of his contributions to Icelandic art, Kjartansson was honoured as the 2016 Reykjavík City Artist.

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV said: ‘This exhibition, the first of its kind in Australia, shares the idiosyncratic worldview of Ragnar with Australian audiences for the very first time. With tongue firmly in cheek, his works have truly captured the zeitgeist with their original combination of music, wit and performance.’

Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy and Children’s Play: Ragnar Kjartansson will be on display from 26 June – 4 October 2026 at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Further information is available via the NGV website: NGV.MELBOURNE 

Image Caption (L to R): Ragnar Kjartansson Me and My Mother 2015, 2015; Ragnar Kjartansson Scenes from Western Culture, Dog and Clock, 2015; Ragnar Kjartansson Sunday Without Love, 2025 Video commissioned by Sigurður Gísli Pálmason, and original performance commissioned by TRANSART25.

© Ragnar Kjartansson; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik