Dan Wolgers | I olivlunden / In the Olive Grove
We are pleased to present Dan Wolgers' first solo exhibition in the gallery: In the Olive Grove.
Dan Wolgers has been one of the most influential Swedish artists for more than three decades. Last year he compiled a book, a kind of legacy of his oeuvre. Much of the book's content was presented in an exhibition and are now part of the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The new exhibition In the Olive Grove is a return to the starting point.
Olle Granath, who has followed Dan Wolgers' since the start, has written a text about the exhibition.
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IN THE OLIVE GROVE
"Much - if not practically all - of what I have done since the self-closing box in 1982 takes place in the olive grove."
Dan Wolgers, December 2013
Jesus went to the olive grove called Gethsemane in the Bible, to pray to his father to deliver him from the ordeal that he was destined for. In the grove he laid bare his anxiety over the lack of freedom of his predestination.
In the grove of the studio, the artist wrestles with predetermination, working according to the compulsive terms of art. Dan Wolgers cites a spiritual father, Elis Eriksson, who saw himself as a tool, someone who is at the disposal of the visiting powers that want to see themselves expressed. Instead of being a pronoun, the artist becomes a verb.
This time, Dan Wolgers ended up in the grove due to a random whim, possibly spawned by boredom. While scanning dust structures on a glass pane for a print project, he suddenly pressed his face against the glass, destroying the patterns of dust, and giving his assistant at the computer a startling surprise when a bestial face appeared distinctly on the screen. If the artist had experienced any uncomfortable proximity to Marcel Duchamp's Elevage de poussière, this proximity was dispersed when the facial grease smeared the dust. The grove took over the activity.
The brutal physiognomies that were then created in this way were given five names: James, John and Peter, the three disciples Jesus took with him to the olive grove, and who abandoned him in his hour of need by falling asleep three times while their master prayed to be delivered from his fate; the fourth is Judas, and the fifth Malchus, the servant whose ear was smote off by Peter's sword and healed by Jesus, as his last miracle.
The five portraits form an exquisite rogues' gallery of individuals for whom doubt is not a top priority. Their faces resemble those painted by Francisco Goya in The Arrest of Christ in the cathedral of Toledo. An illuminated Jesus, resigned to his fate after prayer, is surrounded by a pack of brutes, led on by the kissing Judas. Judas, however, stands out from the soldiers in that he is wearing the same sort of white shirt as Jesus. Something unites them. The central figure knows that his destiny must be fulfilled, the others believe they are following their own free will.
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The five striking imprints were the starting point for a story about presence and absence, about male and female, private and public, about that which cannot be expressed.
The first exhibition room is empty apart from the butt of a lead pipe sticking out of the wall, Mary Magdalene. In the next room, the five physiognomies are on the wall, the rest is a void. But the lead pipe goes through the wall separating the two rooms, with ends knocked out of shape so that it cannot be pulled out, and in here the pipe is named Jesus. In view of the speculations forever attached to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the pipe could be perceived as an obscenity, but it also turns the two rooms into communicating vessels, which, in turn, makes Mary Magdalene and Jesus into one, a unity of male and female.
In a third room, Corpus Christi appears, as the completion of the drama and mystery. It takes the form of a gangly "speech bubble" in iron rod measuring about 200 x 250 cm, shaped vaguely like a swathed body resting on two plain wrought-iron legs. A bewildering and irritating distance lies between this simple construction and its pretentious title, regardless of whether one is a believer or not.
Corpus Christi, however, goes back a long way in Dan Wolgers' practice. Many years ago, he worked at Moderna Museet and became familiar with the Museum's collection in a highly concrete and physical sense. Thus, for instance, Max Ernst's Human Form became an object that was large, heavy and fragile.
Much later, this experience resulted in a series of works consisting of white construction boards with dimensions corresponding to works in the collection, which were perforated so as to be partially transparent. The holes had been made so that the boards should weigh exactly the same as the work whose dimensions it had. The motifs, the formal and metaphysical qualities were gone. What you saw through the holes was other visitors at the exhibition.
Do these transformed works from Moderna Museet hold a key to Corpus Christi? In a synopsis for the exhibition, the artist writes: "In that sculpture, the narrow lead pipe is alternated when the viewers, via Corpus Christi, see each other and can touch each other." We move from something closed and inaccessible, to a candid view of our neighbour.
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See and touch, two verbs that sum up much of Dan Wolgers' art; remember the box from 1982 that stuck out a peg and turned the switch off just as we thought we were about to discover the secret. This applies not only to the viewer of his works but most poignantly to himself. What happened when he grew tired of the dust structures and instead created the five bestial images of Man that are portraits of himself? They may have historical names, but his persona was still in the grasp of the grove.
A silence envelopes what takes place there in the olive grove, in the battle against destiny, while that which happens to him is announced to the world in good humour. The more impossible the metaphors, the broader his grin. The lead pipe through the wall is no dirty joke, it is the unexpected solution that is revealed only when the thumbscrews in the grove are turned as tight as can be.
Olle Granath
Translation: Gabriella Berggren
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