At CHART 2024 we look forward to present a solo-booth dedicated to Tony Matelli’s Arrangements, as well as Jacob Dahlgren’s interactive installation I, The World, Things, Life which will be presented at the historic amusement park Tivoli Gardens.
In Matelli’s Arrangements commonplace bouquets of flowers are upended and reified into miraculous and meticulously constructed sculptures. The works, often resting upon a single petal, bear no load from their gravitational sublimation; almost as images or ideas, these sculptures are reinstated upon the pedestal as if the laws of nature containing them were intact—yet inverted—around them.
Dahlgren's I, The World, Things, Life consists of multiple dartboards and darts. The work removes the hand of the artist and instead functions more as a series of instructions. In the large-scale installation, the audience is invited to engage with the work by throwing darts against the dartboards. Scoring a bullseye should be easy with so many chances, but the more one tries to focus, the more the targets move. Darts are thrown until the boxes are empty. The darts are then returned to the boxes and the process continues.
Tony Matelli (b. 1971, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, USA. His works has for almost three decades been widely internationally exhibited and can today be found in numerous museum collections including ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (DK), ARKEN Museum of Modern Art (DK), FLAG Art Foundation (US), FRAC Bordeaux (FR), Magasin III (SE/IL), MUDAM (LU) and Musee d’arte Contemporain Montreal (CA). Matelli was recently exhibited in Hyper Sensible, Un regard sur la sculpture hyperréaliste at Musée d’Arts de Nantes as well as in Reshaped Reality: 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy.
Tony Matelli works in a variety of sculptural techniques and materials, his œuvre displaying an uncanny fusion of conceptual clarity and technical breadth. His sculptures possess a concision and frankness that can seem both crass and profound. There is an element of provocation in Matelli’s work; a protest against playing by the universally accepted rules or conventions that exist as an inseparable part of the world that surrounds us. His sculptures can best be described as anti-monuments, re-interpreting the tradition of hyperrealism in American sculpture.
Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. He received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 1999. He has exhibited widely in institutions such as Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2023), Stavanger Kunstmuseum (2020-2021), Copenhagen Contemporary (2019), Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch (2017), MAGASIN – Centre National d’Art Contemporain (2016), KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2013, 2011 and 2010), Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2010, 2013), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2010), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006). In 2007 he represented Sweden at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
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. Dahlgren’s 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.
