Rollins Museum of Art

Image: Ragnar Kjartansson, Sunday Without Love, 2025. Single-channel video. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist’s proofs. Duration: 19 minutes 14 seconds. Music by Davíð Þór Jónsson and Ragnar Kjartansson, based on lyrics and music by Rocko Schamoni. Video commissioned by Sigurður Gísli Pálmason, and original performance commissioned by TRANSART25.

The Rollins Museum of Art is pleased to announce the acquisition of Sunday Without Love, a single-channel video work by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, which first exhibited publicly in the fall of 2025 at Luhring Augustine in New York City. The work will appear concurrent with the inaugural exhibition in the Museum’s new building, a $29M, 32,000 sq. ft. project, which is scheduled to open in early 2028. Curated around a theme of “love,” the show explores the complexities and nuances of love and human connection.

Sunday Without Love inspired the concept for the exhibition, which draws upon the depth and distinction of the Rollins Museum of Art’s collection to reflect on the enduring, multifaceted dimensions of affection, compassion, and belonging in our time. The gift of Kjartansson’s work enriches the Museum’s world-class Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, a collection of over 600 works by leading artists presented at the Rollins Museum of Art and the nearby boutique art hotel, The Alfond Inn.

“This acquisition is a thrilling addition to the Museum’s Alfond Collection, representing one of the most significant artists of our time through an already lauded work and strengthening our holdings in time-based media,” said the Rollins Museum of Art’s Bruce A. Beal Executive Director Leslie Anderson.

Sunday Without Love is inspired by a mid-twentieth century postcard that lives on Kjartansson’s fridge depicting a scene of people wearing matching folk costumes in a nameless location and, incongruously, one of them holding a jazz guitar. Kjartansson, along with nine other performers, donned outfits to mimic this postcard and performed a fragile chorus on repeat in a similar idyllic, pastoral setting. The music was adapted by Kjartansson and frequent collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson from “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen,” a 1996 comedic song by German artist Rocko Schamoni. Set against the backdrop of the quiet, and deeply European, countryside the lyrics, “You must learn to live without love,” disrupt the bucolic mood with a feeling of tragic longing, endings, and stoic resignation. In a confluence of references from classical pastoral painting to traditional romantic ballads, the work evokes a portrait of unrequited love as well as a Buddhist sense of acceptance. The video Sunday Without Love was produced from a performance commissioned by TRANSART25, that was originally presented in Renon, Italy in September 2025.

Kjartansson, whose practice is deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater, often creates works imbued with the personal as well as irony and ambiguity. Repeatedly threading through his works, and evidenced in Sunday Without Love, are seemingly oppositional sentiments—humor with sincerity, romance with melancholy—that intertwine in a nuanced balance of contradictions and concordances. A defining characteristic of Kjartansson’s oeuvre is an ability to be at once empathetic and sardonic towards these strong emotions, and to simultaneously embrace the profound and the sincere while holding it at a distance.

Ragnar Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums in his performative practice. Myriad references such as the history of film, music, theatre, visual culture and literature find their way into his video installations, durational performances, drawings and paintings. Pretending and staging are key tools in the Kjartansson’s efforts to convey sincere emotion and offer a genuine experience to the audience.

Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. Major solo shows have been exhibited widely around the world, and include presentations at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Reykjavík Art Museum; Barbican Centre, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington D.C.; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; 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 and Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award.