Who is this artist and why is his mother spitting at him?

Having created what’s been called the best art of the 21st century, Iceland’s Ragnar Kjartansson might also be the manosphere’s greatest antidote.

It’s 10.30pm in Reykjavik when I hop onto a Zoom call with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. “It’s like meeting someone in a bar,” he says with good cheer.

In Melbourne, it’s breakfast time and not quite the bar vibe, but Kjartansson has a way of giving the most ordinary of interactions a warm, boozy glow. He has barely changed since I first saw him, in 2009, at the Venice Biennale: still bearded, still with the rakish sweep of sandy hair and mischievous grin. The circular, black-rimmed spectacles could be new.

Then 33, Kjartansson was the youngest artist to represent Iceland at the Biennale. He did so with The End, an odd, improvised affair in an impressively derelict 14th-century Venetian palazzo that gave on to the Grand Canal. Inside the damp, dimly lit space, a long-limbed guy in Speedos smoked, read, drank and listened to the vinyl that spun on a ’70s turntable. Water lapped against the palazzo walls, sunlight glistened off the canal, and Kjartansson painted the skinny guy’s portrait again and again. Beer bottles and cigarette butts piled up, and paintings proliferated.

Nothing much else happened. And yet of all the works I saw at the Biennale that year, it was Kjartansson’s that stayed with me. I was drawn to its slow, dreamy pace, and the sanctuary it offered from the crowds of Venice, and the posturing of the art establishment. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t entirely sure what it all meant.

“Me neither!” Kjartansson says jovially. “I don’t really want to know what my works are about because when I know, they’re not that exciting.”

In what feels overdue, the artist, now 50, is being celebrated in a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, with video works from 2000 to the present. Kjartansson’s reputation and oeuvre have grown significantly since his Venice Biennale days. In 2019, The Guardian named his nine-screen video installation The Visitors as the best art of the 21st century thus far, positioning him ahead of other prominent artists including Pussy Riot, Doris Salcedo, Ai Weiwei and fellow Icelander Olafur Eliasson.

“My grandma was alive then, bless her,” Kjartansson says. “I told her and she said, it’s an Icelandic phrase – ‘ekki er öll vitleysan eins’ – ‘ah well, not all silliness is the same’.”

That wise Icelandic saying neatly sums up Kjartansson’s work; his performances and videos are a weirdly hypnotic marriage of the silly and the profound. They might feature a cou