« Take Me Here » by Dishwasher, Memorial For Marriage, 2011, music by Kjartan Sveisson, performance views, bawag contemporary, Vienna, Austria (May-June 2011). Photo by Oliver Ottenschläger

icelandic artist

In 2009, Ragnar Kjartansson was the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale. In a marathon performance called The End, he made one painting of the same friend wearing a Speedo every day for six months — with plenty of cigarette butts and beer bottles piling up along the way. The performance was characteristic of Ragnar’s work, which is imbued with a self-conscious playful- ness and guileless irony, often using repetitive per- formance to reveal unex- pected meanings.

With exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and TBA21 in Vienna, and a theater production at the Volksbühne in Berlin, 2014 is a big…