Third Uncle

Workplace Gallery is delighted to announce Third Uncle the first solo exhibition of Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren at Workplace London. Third Uncle brings together a series of new abstract paintings made using live electrical cable set into a pristine surface of layered acrylic paint. Oscillating between painting and installation, form and function Dahlgren’s plug-in works are connected together alongside lamps, TV monitors, and other everyday electrical items creating a circuit throughout the entire gallery. 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 (and frequently, knowingly Scandinavian); 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, used in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they becomedemocratic rather than authored. Through endless ingenious amalgams of pattern, abstraction and mass-produced objects, Dahlgren's recent works purposefully inhabit modes of modernist painting, deliberately playing with the inherent autonomy of the source material.

Jacob Dahlgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York, USA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; and Tramway, Glasgow, UK. He lives and works in Stockholm.