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. His collections of ordinary objects, often domestic, repetitive, industrially manufactured and ubiquitous, stand in their gestalt form as a proxy for ‘High Modernist Abstract Painting’, and for all the ideological territory that ‘Twentieth Century Art Theory’ has staked out for it. The contributing objects, meanwhile, signify both the human and the collective; each represents an individual choice, to be uniquely used or consumed, yet together, they stand for the community, and thus become democratic, rather than authored.
Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied from 1994 to 1999 at The Royal Institute of Fine Art, Stockholm, and he received his M.F.A. in 1999.
