"Fångsten"
Executed 2005. Unique. Painted bronze, height 120 cm.
Provenance
Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm.
Private Collection, Stockholm.
Exhibitions
Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm, "Group Show", 19 November - 21 December 2005.
More information
Dan Wolgers is one of Sweden's most esteemed and controversial contemporary artists. His art is filled with playfulness, humour and absurd ideas, and his ability to distort, provoke and retort leave few viewers untouched. In a well-timed and an unerring way he presents a fresh view of life and of seemingly meaningless objects.
The auction’s “Fångsten” is a unique painted bronze sculpture made in 2005 and exhibited at Lars Bohman Gallery the same year. The fishing boy in bronze is an enlarged bric-a-brac porcelain figure, with a head from another figure in his basket. The effect is dreamlike, is the scene actually taking place in the boy’s head?
Later on, in 2007, another three bronze sculptures with the same expression were made, they were named “Nattfiskare”. One of them is placed at the famous Stockholm restaurant Taverna Brillo. Of this sculpture, Dan Wolgers said:
‘Eternally on the way, with eyes closed, the figure stops a blow and rests his mighty head in a basket on his back. He wears his head, but is himself carried, by a thread thin as a dream, or a dream thin as a thread. It is the bronze sculpture Nattfiskare who fishes dreams for the entire area. A colossal catch in the basket.’
More about Dan Wolgers
Dan Wolgers is a Swedish sculptor, born in 1955 in Stockholm and educated at the Royal Institute of Art from 1980 to 1985 (he later became a professor there from 1995 to 1998). Wolgers is full of inspiration and humour, a playful Dadaist who experiments with and questions almost everything, and of course, he provokes and shocks the viewer. He was commissioned to design the cover for the Stockholm telephone directory, but instead of creating an image, he placed the phone number for his studio. The directory is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When he was to participate in a group exhibition at Liljevalchs Art Hall, he requested to borrow two benches, which he immediately sold at auction. He was reported for embezzlement and was conditionally sentenced to daily fines. The verdict arrived in the post in a sealed envelope, which he signed and sold for 20,000 SEK. Wolgers puts everything to the test, even the sign "Here ends the public road." "I try to visualise and manifest different aspects of life in my art," he says. "On a personal level, I use my work to try to understand something of what I and others have to do here on earth."
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