Martin Asbæk Gallery is pleased to present Writing on the Wall, a new solo exhibition by Kristian Dahlgaard. Dahlgaard’s wall-mounted sculptures unfurl across the surface as gestural tracings made from metal and rendered in vivid colours, like three-dimensional drawings in space rather than on paper.
The title suggests that something foreseeable is about to happen – clear in hindsight but unrecognized in the moment – and thereby also captures the paradox of the human experience: We move through time without full understanding. In this way, the “writing on the wall” might have been visible all along, but clarity arrives only in retrospect.
In the exhibition, Dahlgaard’s work reveals itself as a form of artistic, nonverbal language without any direct meaning. The works’ looping, scribbled contours evoke the immediacy of a sketch while asserting themselves with the physical presence of a sculpture.
As an artist, Kristian Dahlgaard works extensively with the sculpture’s weight and with the absence of mass. His work is meticulously engineered from countless metal parts, arranged and welded together, one by one. Each piece feels both spontaneous and deliberate, transforming walls into fields of movement and energy, mimicking the slow, fluid motion of the lava lamp or even the elongation of a cell before it divides and takes on a new life.
However, the artist highlights the importance of doing something that one doesn’t necessarily know what will lead to. Maintaining life’s mystery, in which the innocence of early experience hint at historical shifts, like large weather systems that ripple across the globe with alternating high and low pressures. New winds are always blowing, and just as changeable is the nerve of art.
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Kristian Dahlgaard (b. 1958) graduated from the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1983. Since the groundbreaking exhibition Kniven på Hovedet in 1982, Dahlgaard has exhibited at Esbjerg Art Museum, Art in Aalborg, Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand, Herning Art Museum, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, among others, and several international art fairs. Dahlgaard is part of several major collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst, Ny Carlsberg Fondet, Kunsten i Aalborg, Collection Nobel & Hug in Zürich and Anni and Otto Detlefs Fonden.
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