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 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, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, to be used or consumed in a unique way 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.

I, the world, things, life, a seminal work in Dahlgren’s œuvre, was first presented when he represented Sweden in the exhibition Welfare Fare Well the Nordic pavilioncurated by Rene Block at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. It has subsequently been shown at numerous institutions, Copenhagen Contemporary, Museum Ritter Germany, Kervo Art Museum Finland, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA MAGASIN – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble France Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain and Luxembourg Forum d'art contemporain to name but a few.

Dahlgren was born 1970 in Stockholm where he lives and works. He received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1999.