STOCKHOLM.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko has opened the Stockholm fall season with Not and Or, a solo-exhibition by Jacob Dahlgren. The exhibition runs through September 28.
Not and Or is a series of three-dimensional objects as paintings, connecting Dahlgren’s interest for the everyday with an eye for the possibilities of the discarded. Using left-overs from his studio practice, shipping material or simply found objects, he creates work that mimic classic form and even may appear familiar. This relationship with everyday life is one of the pillars of Dahlgren’s practice. Dahlgren constantly seeks geometric and abstract patterns in the surrounding world and processes the mundane and quotidian into art. His own life is inseparable from his work in a tangible way, for his project Peinture Abstraite he has worn striped t-shirts for the last fifteen years and plans to do so for the rest of his life, as a living and on-going exhibition, sometimes with external curators invited for a couple of weeks.
Jacob Dahlgren’s work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. Dahlgren’s repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured; stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, to be used or consumed in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. This is evident in Dahlgrens’s social practice – a series of performance events around the world involving local communities – as well as in the large-scale sculptural installations for which he is well known.
Dahlgren was born 1970 in Stockholm where he lives and works. He received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1999. He has exhibited widely in institutions such as Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch (2017), MAGASIN – Centre National d’Art Contemporain (2016), KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2013, 2011 and 2010), Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2010, 2013), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2010), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006). In 2007 he represented Sweden at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Art is Life, a survey exhibition of Dahlgren’s work opened on August 24 at Copenhagen Contemporary, showcasing a series of the artist’s large-scale installations (until Dec 19). Dahlgren’s work can currently be seen in Continous Refle(a)ction at the Riverside Art Museum in Beijing (until Aug 28) as well as at OpenArt in Örebro (until Sep 1).
