Whoever enters the world of Jacob Dahlgren (born in 1970 in Stockholm) embarks upon a journey which calls to mind long-forgotten days of childhood, and which summons up the joy in regarding and exploring a pictorial world that plays with the familiar and constantly delights in new ways. Alice in Wonderland sends her greetings. This world of Jacob Dahlgren presents itself with a refreshing lack of inhibition: it is full of bright and loud colors, distinct structures and forms, and of course - something which is not at all surprising in this context - mirrors are present in his works again and again. This is a parallel world which seemingly functions in accordance with known laws, but then yields up its peculiarities and marvels.

Dahlgren's materials are often banal and quotidian, objects for everyday use which were produced for another purpose that is "foreign to art": plastic clothes-hangers, yoghurt containers, dartboards, colored pens, mirror-(foils), sponges, silk ribbons and so forth, or "trivial" materials which come from the building-supply stores of this world. Nevertheless his art is a long way from being conducive to a reading as trash. His sense for handling and using material is too disciplined and too clearly conceived for that to be the case. Dahlgren's formal language refers back to visual experiences which remind the viewer of various artistic styles of the twentieth century such as Constructivism, Op Art, Minimal Art and Pop Art. His pictorial compositions, large-scale sculptures and installations are all imbued, in spite of their formal severity, with something delightfully liberating, an invocation of the play instinct of homo ludens. Emerging into view here is a new structure of formal laws derived from the pleasure principle and physical attraction. Exemplary in this regard is the work I, the world, things, life which Dahlgren realized last year for the Art Museum Norrköping in Sweden. Dahlgren hung a large exhibition wall with some 900 black-and-white dartboards, placed alongside each other, so that from a distance the impression arose of a carefully calculated work of Op Art - the dissolving of the surface in favor of a giant rotational field. A few meters in front of the wall, Dahlgren set down a box with red darts and began bombarding the Op Art structure. This was certainly an amusing action, but in addition it made a clever reference to the stock of art-historical quotations from the last fifty years. The abrogation of the rigid pictorial space (Op Art) by means of everyday culture (a game of darts) also made it possible to write in this form a new chapter in Action Painting.

Just as typical of Dahlgren's work is the on-site installation The possibility of eternal conceptual misunderstandings, which he created in 2003 in Helsinki. Distributed throughout the exhibition space were numerous sculptures consisting of cubes made of mirror-glass and mostly having several parts. Stacked one on top of the other and manifesting various formats, there were borrowings with regard to the formal vocabulary of Minimal Art (Donald Judd) and the (architectural) designs of the Russian Constructivists (El Lissitzky). The shining surfaces of the cubes threw everything back and mirrored the reflections once again, so that any clear perceptual forms were dissolved and blended into a spatial image that was difficult to define. Playing a fundamental role here were the walls, upon which there hung colorful strip-pictures in various formats - an impressive kaleidoscope of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture.

The playful delight in passing beyond borders evinced by the oeuvre of Jacob Dahlgren brings with it a subversiveness which penetrates all the way to daily life. For years now, the artist has been collecting and purchasing striped shirts from all around the world, and he currently possesses a stock of more than 800 items which he utilizes as models for his paintings as well as in actions and performances. This was the case recently in Stockholm, when 350 people in striped shirts swarmed into a large shopping mall as "living pictures." In this way, fashionable accessories are gathered and re-allocated in an artistic and concrete mode - the sphere of everyday culture can no longer be distinctly separated from the sphere of art.

In the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Jacob Dahlgren is presenting a work which stands in the widest sense in the tradition of "striped painting." It was conceived for the space (the former switch-tower) which starting in April 2005 has become available to the Kunstverein as a second action-space in addition to the actual exhibition rooms: a stage-space with rising auditorium, seats and a stage for performances - a theatrical realm and not a white cube.

Dahlgren makes uncompromising use of the spatial situation to realize his own formal language and creates upon the stage of the "switch-tower" a clear image which dominates the stage-space like an abstract painting. His work spreads out over a surface that is 4 meters high, 9 meters wide and 5 meters deep. It consists of thousands of silk ribbons (altogether 32,000 with a total length of 160,000 meters) which hang side by side in close array in bright, shimmering colors, and which summon up associations with the minimalist compositions of Agnes Martin or Barnett Newman. The viewer can content himself with the "pure" visual experience of the work and consider the installation as a two-dimensional image - or he becomes interactively involved and steps right into the picture of Jacob Dahlgren. The more deeply he penetrates into the sculptural space consisting of closely hung strips of silk, the stronger becomes his feeling of losing control over the surrounding space.

Mathias Güntner
Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof