When Anxieties Become Form

Workplace is pleased to present When Anxieties Become Form, a new solo exhibition by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren. Opening on Thursday 29 August, the exhibition will feature new and reimagined sculpture and installation by Dahlgren.

In our ground floor gallery, Dahlgren will present a new version of his seminal installation From Art to Life to Art. Colourful tin cans are stacked end to end and snake impossibly throughout the gallery space. The legacy of Minimalism’s intrinsic relationship between the object, space, and the body is expanded by Dahlgren. The contents of the tin-cans having been consumed by the artist, and their metallic graphic wrapped cylindrical husks remaining as both record and measure. These familiar items are removed of their original function and recontextualised as a colourful abstract linear geometric form, creating a dialogue between pure formal abstraction and a shared social culture. From Art to Life to Art speaks both to high modernism and minimalism as well as to pertinent contemporary issues of food production, consumption, cost of living and the economies of a personal and global nature.

A series of new wall-based sculptural works, considered as paintings by Dahlgren, are on view in the lower ground floor. Formed from mass-produced coat hangers, composed in a horizontal striped pattern, these works continue Dahlgren’s longstanding investigation into geometric and abstract motifs in the everyday environment. Stripped of their original function, the coat hangers transcend their utilitarian origins to become vibrant and dynamic works.

A grouping of maquettes by Dahlgren are positioned on plinths in our viewing room, highlighting the artist’s extensive public art practice which have been commissioned internationally in sculpture parks, public plazas and civic environments. These maquettes – both realised and unrealised as major works - are sculptures in their own right, representing Dahlgren’s ability to playfully reimagine his additive process as giant rhizomatic forms and environments of monumental scale.

This exhibition highlights Dahlgren’s ability to recontextualise everyday objects, transforming them into works that challenge viewers’ perceptions, revealing beauty in the ordinary. Through grounding the materiality of his works in the quotidian and ubiquitous, Dahlgren upends the rarified exclusivity of ‘Modern Art’ - rediscovering it in everyday scenarios, and infusing the abstract with the political.