描述

“From A to Z” is the first collection of Jacob Dahlgren’s complete body of work to date, stretching over two decades. In this format, presenting the work alphabetically by title, old meets new and like any other urban A to Z guide, Dahlgren’s work is linked with action, involving the viewer, opening up space and offering a different perspective on the everyday.

Jacob Dahlgren, born 1970, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Learning at an early stage to think in graphics, his work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a 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, stand for the group or community and as such they become democratic rather than authored.

Contributors to the book include Magnus af Petersens, Director-elect at Bonniers Konsthall, with his essay Casual Utopia and the Director of the Daimler Art Collection (Stuttgart / Berlin), Renate Wiehager, who provides an overview that expands and condenses different aspects of the large number of references in Dahlgren’s work. Further supporting texts are provided by Jacquelyn Davis, Matthias Ulrich, Steven Wolf, Stina Högkvist, Harry Weeks and Sally O’Reilly.