PARIS.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko is presenting Units of Measurements, Jacob Dahlgren’s first solo exhibition in France. The exhibition runs through January 29, 2022.
Using left-overs from his studio practice, shipping material or simply everyday objects such as coat hangers, pens, dart boards, art magazines, and T-shirts, Dahlgren creates work that mimics classic form and may even appear familiar. This relationship with everyday life is one of the pillars of Dahlgren’s practice where he 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, as 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 Dahlgren’s social practice – a series of performance events around the world involving local communities – as well as in the large-scale sculptural installations in the public space for which he is well known.
The title, Units of Measurements, refers to a series of works where Dahlgren uses folding rulers to make rigorous arrangements on the wall, creating, minimalist and multicoloured pictorial patterns. Heaven is a Place on Earth is a floor-based interactive sculpture, inviting the viewer to set foot on the installation of scales, thus modifying a familiar action whilst having the work itself uniquely impacted by their body.
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 of Concrete Art Ingolstadt, Germany (2021), Triennial for Contemporary art, Belgium (2021), Kunsthalle Göppingen, Germany (2020), Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway 2020-2021, Copenhagen Contemporary 2019 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.
