REYKJAVÍK.- i8 Gallery is presenting The Brown Period, a year-long exhibition by Ragnar Kjartansson at i8 Grandi. This presentation, which is Kjartansson’s sixth solo show at i8, opened on 18 January and will be on view until 18 December 2025. Throughout the year, the artist will exhibit new works and existing projects over two rooms, each painted in a shade of brown. The opening presentation debuts a new two-channel video by the artist, A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird (2025), which features Kjartansson and his longtime collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson.


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The Brown Period is an extended project, intended to be a dive into the realms of the experimental. As i8 Grandi is a short walk from Kjartansson’s studio, the artist will treat the gallery as a project space where lucky strikes and failure collides. For the artist, the bass drum in the project space will be new video works and studio shorts, mixing drama, music, and cinematic indulgence. The works on view will continue to change throughout the year as the show evolves.

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.

Spanning far longer than traditional museum or gallery shows, i8 Grandi’s programming focuses on concepts of space and time. The sustained duration of the annual format allows artists to consider how time affects their work, and the fluidity encourages audiences to revisit the changing installations. Kjartansson’s is the fourth year-long presentation at i8 Grandi, following exhibitions by Andreas Eriksson in 2024, B. Ingrid Olson in 2023, and Alicja Kwade in 2022.

Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. Kjartansson has had solo exhibitions at major venues including: The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; 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 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and De Pont Museum, Tilburg, 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, as well as Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award.


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