Despite his young age, Jacob Dahlgren (born 1970) of Sweden is a painter, sculptor and conceptual artist of broad experience. Alongside solo exhibitions, he has participated in many important international showings. Three permanent works by him have been commissioned for public buildings in Sweden, and his works are in the collections of the British Museum, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Kiasma in Helsinki, in addition to many public collections in Sweden. He is known in Finland as a candidate in last year’s competition for the Ars Fennica Prize
Dahlgren’s art is intellectually and visually entertaining; it is fun and aesthetically pleasing, and easy to like.
In the catalogue of the Galerie Anhava exhibition, Stina Högkvist writes:
"Jacob Dahlgren collects stripes. In his unceasing Signs of Abstraction project he photographs all the striped patterns that he can find in his surroundings. His collection of photographs contains pictures of awnings, caps, t-shirts, the façades of houses, buses, staircases and roller blinds. Every time I meet Jacob, he is wearing a striped t-shirt. He buys practically all the striped shirts that he sees, and at home he has 400 shirts stored away waiting to be worn. In addition to the everyday wear and use of the clothes, their patterns provide a starting point in his current series of stripe paintings where the shirt patterns define the form of the painting. Close-ups of the patterns produce abstract paintings. Someone taking a strict view of concepts might regard the works as portraits of shirts rather than abstract paintings. But that is of no importance in this connection. It is interesting to see how this procedure gives randomness, mass production and play precedence over the pompous views of modernism regarding the forces of the spirit and the special nature of artistic thinking. And there is no difference to be seen in the finished product.
Hung on the walls of Galerie Anhava at regular intervals are approximately one hundred shirt paintings. There are stripes everywhere… Only snobs think that evaluations of shirts and art differ in some way from each other. Standing in the middle of the room is a group of towers faced with mirrors. Some are no larger than mushrooms, while other reach as far as the ceiling. Their staggered contours make them look like skyscrapers. Manhattan no doubt misses them. In the adjacent darkened room there is a solitary tower covered with a self-illuminating membrane radiating with a yellow-green glow. The piece is like a negative of what takes place outside. A nightclub version of Malevich’s tower.
Myriad mirrors join the viewers, paintings and pieces of sculpture into a psychedelic whole. A confirmed pragmatic might see the mirrors only as a good opportunity to fix her lipstick. Others will no doubt notice that the reflections put the installation in a continuous state of change. It cuts off the whole, opening access to potential infinity where entrances and exits alternate. It seems impossible to find the centre. The parts are not larger than the whole and the whole is not larger than its parts. In fact, this is no harder than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Time is not absolute. The past, the present and the future coexist side by side. The movements of the observer dictate what is space, and what in turn is time."
Ilona Anhava
