Jacob Dahlgren

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About The Work

For CHART in Tivoli 2024, Jacob Dahlgren presents an interactive installation, “I, The World, Things, Life” consisting of multiple dartboards and darts. The work removes the hand of the artist and instead functions more as a series of instructions. A wall in one of Tivoli’s many restaurants is covered by dartboards; the optical illusion begins. Darts are placed in boxes next to the installation, and the audience is invited to engage with the work. Scoring a bullseye should be easy with so many chances, but the more one tries to focus, the more the targets move. Darts are thrown until the boxes are empty. The darts are then returned to the boxes and the process continues.

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 socially shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, and industrially manufactured; stand in their gestalt form as a proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territories 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 uniquely 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 in the public space for which he is well known.

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 twenty 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.

About The Artist

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 Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2023), Stavanger Kunstmuseum (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.

Jacob Dahlgren is represented by Andréhn-Schiptjenko.

Find out more about CHART in Tivoli 2024