Nordic Contemporary at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum
Ragnar Kjartansson, Iceland (b. 1976) Ragnar Kjartansson moves freely among various art forms, composing music for sculptures, making performative paintings, and transforming film into tableaux vivants. His work encompasses video installations based on repetitive structures, performances, and series of plein air paintings. In his art, Kjartansson analyzes emotional layers, social dimensions, and conflicting elements that can be found in our everyday lives. Ragnar is this years recipient of the Ars Fennica award.
Aurora Reinhard, Finland (b. 1975) Aurora Reinhard has been called a “great explorer of life.” She gathers motifs for her work from mass media and marketing illustrations and from the history of Western art. But she interprets the images through her own experiences and often by changing the gender of her subject or the way she looks at an object. In her art, Reinhard has long examined power and emotional relationships between men and women.
Egill Sæbjörnsson, Iceland (b. 1973) Egil Sæbjörnsson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is based on using technology as an extension of painting and sculpture, but also on combining real objects and projecting illusions with light, music, and performance. His art is experimental, shrewd, immediate, and deep. Questions about existence permeate his work. Sæbjörnsson is known primarily for his fictional friends, Ugh and Boogar, the thirty-six-meter-tall man-eating trolls who love coffee and became world-famous at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2017.
About the Ars Fennica Award Ars Fennica is awarded every second year by the Henna and Pertti Niemistös Ars Fennica Art Foundation. The foundation was established in 1990 to provide support for the visual arts, create new international contacts for Finnish artists, and encourage artists in their creative endeavors. 40,000 euros in prize money makes it one of the largest and most well-established artist’s awards in the Nordic region.This year’s Ars Fennica Award has been bestowed on the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
The jury includes Leena Niemistö, MD; Leevi Haapala, Director of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art; Kai Kartio, Museum Director at Amos Rex; and artist Jussi Kivi. Roland Wetzel, Director at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, made the final selection of the award winner.
For more information och photos: Emelie Sandahl, Event and Marketing
076 133 82 66
emelie@sven-harrys.se
