Jacob Dahlgren collects abstractions. They are all around us in our modern society. He photographs them and then makes art out of it. But not always directly. Jacob Dahlgren simplifies concrete details, thinks away certain characteristics of an object or phenomenon in order to highlight others. He draws inspiration directly from nature or from everyday objects that we hardly notice or even think of as art. It can be the subway map, a wiring diagram or an abstract painting that can be the starting point and inspiration for a work.
The works in Constructing a New World [Under construction] have their starting point in nature and the tree’s shapes and plant patterns. In the tree, Jacob sees the interaction between nature and abstraction, between the concrete and the imaginative. It is a creative process where anything when reshaped and abstracted can take on a stem, color and shape and become a sculpture or a graphic leaf that we read or see as a tree.
In Jacob Dahlgren’s art, new associations are created with things we already know again and again and give us a new way of looking at our world around us, whether it concerns trees, shapes or symbols.
