Jacob Dahlgren - Retrospektiv kommersiell: Live in Your Head: Stockholm
Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present Retrospektiv kommersiell: Live in Your Head, Jacob Dahlgren’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing on works from various periods of his practice, the exhibition highlights recurring ideas that Dahlgren has developed, reinterpreted and occasionally reworked over time. Although shaped by a wide range of projects, the works converge here in a coherent and expanded reflection on abstraction, participation and the everyday.
Dahlgren’s practice is rooted in a democratic approach to art, inviting collective experience through workshops, public actions and interactive installations, welcoming audiences regardless of prior knowledge. He seeks to bridge the gap between art and viewers, fostering participation, shared authorship and new ways of perceiving the world. Drawing on minimalist explorations of the body-object relationship, Heaven is a Place on Earth (2006) is a constellation of readymade scales on the gallery floor, merging the everyday with the legacies of modernist art and encouraging viewers to become one with the work.
A defining feature of Dahlgren’s work is his attention to the abstractions embedded in contemporary life. Drawing from shared culture, the public sphere and urban environments, he collects shapes, patterns and colours that often go unnoticed. In his ongoing project Peinture Abstraite, Dahlgren has worn striped T-shirts for the past twenty five years—and intends to continue indefinitely—as a living exhibition. This commitment is reflected in the exhibited video works. I (2009–2022) documents the artist in these shirts, while Neoconcrete Space (2013) loops his first 1,000 shirts, producing a stream of abstract, wordless visual information. Non-Object (2013) shifts focus to others wearing horizontally striped tops in urban spaces, filmed covertly. By centering each person at a consistent distance, Dahlgren transforms individuals into motifs of abstraction, creating a tension between the innocent accumulation of pattern and the subtle unease of obsessive observation.
Many of Dahlgren’s works involve sorting and arranging mass-produced materials—domestic or industrial readymades such as dartboards, Corian, MDF, saws and sandpaper—into precise compositions. The anonymity of the repeated elements evokes a collective human presence, transforming individual objects into expressions of community and democratic engagement. This approach is evident in works such as Units of Measurements (2012), Open Time Project (2004-2026) and Subject of Art (2012), where wooden folding rules, plastic coat hangers and pencils are rendered into formal, abstract compositions. By removing these items from their original function and arranging them serially, layered or packed into cubical forms, Dahlgren uncovers latent aesthetic potential. The resulting works reveal rhythm, texture and geometric pattern, generating new associations and contemporary contexts. In this way, the mundane is rendered painterly and sculptural, highlighting the visual possibilities inherent in commonplace materials.
At the core of Dahlgren’s practice is the belief that abstraction, as a process of reduction, opens new ways of seeing. His works invite viewers to reconsider the structures and patterns embedded in everyday life. This approach is exemplified in General & Specific (2025), a series that links geometric abstraction directly to social surroundings. The minimalist compositions, with their bright colours and clean forms, evoke the language of concretism, while each abstraction corresponds to a specific scene from a photographic archive displayed alongside the works. By translating these fleeting observations into formal compositions, Dahlgren reveals the aesthetic structures present in the ordinary, encouraging viewers to recognise them within their own surroundings.
Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. He received his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in 1999. His work has been exhibited widely, including recent presentations at Kiasma, Helsinki and Setouchi Triennale, Japan. In 2007, Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Later this spring, Dahlgren will participate in a group exhibition at the Swedish Institute in Paris, presented as an homage to the Swedish painter and sculptor Olle Baertling (1911–1981). In conjunction with the exhibition, Dahlgren will also present Demonstration in the streets of Paris — a silent, non-political group march in which participants carry signs featuring Baertling’s paintings.
