"Mamma, pappa, barn"
Signed and dated 1984. Oil and assemblage on masonite. Diameter 100 cm.
Provenance
Fredrik Roos Collection.
Stockholms Auktionsverk, "Fredrik Roos nordiska samling från Rooseum", 27 September 2006, cat no. 40.
Acquired from the above.
Tom Böttiger Collection, Stockholm.
Exhibitions
Mejan, Stockholm, 1984.
Centre Culturel Suedois, Paris, "Vive l'enfant", 1985.
Bror Hjorts Hus, Uppsala, "Dan Wolgers", 1990.
Liljevalchs konsthall. Stockholm, "Dan Wolgers", 27 October 2001 - 6 January 2002.
Malmö Konstmuseum, "Dan Wolgers", 10 February - 7 April 2002.
CF Hill, Stockholm, "Samling Tom Böttiger, Part I", 26 September - 15 November 2019.
Literature
Dan Wolger & Pontus Hultén, "Dan Wolgers 120 verk 1977-1996", cat no 18, illustrated p. 24.
Rooseum 1988-1998, Malmö 1998, avbildad helsida i färg, sid. 80.
Dan Wolgers, Liljevalchs kontshall, Stockholm 2001, illustrated full page in colour 1984 Mejan, no. 1.
More information
Mamma, pappa, barn (Mother, Father, Child) is one of Dan Wolgers' key works from his early years at the Royal Institute of Art in the early 1980s. Here, he explains how it came about:
Through my first solo exhibitions while I was still studying at Mejan, I had experienced that my moving sculptures, with their rattling and jerky components, had an unintentional and unwanted seductive effect on the viewer. I wanted to counteract this by creating a simple and calm moving sculpture that would primarily achieve its kinetic effect through the relentless and regular laws of gravity (for which I have no responsibility). The result was Mamma, pappa, barn, where the round disc rotates slowly, causing the flaps with facial features to fall into place on their own, and the faces continuously change identity (I had recently become a father for the first time). The effect can perhaps be likened to staring into a fire, similar to how Marcel Duchamp comments on the function of his rotating bicycle wheel on a stool. Perhaps it was with this sculpture that I began the ongoing series of moving sculptures that work regardless of the direction of rotation - Mamma, pappa, barn works in both directions, just like Duchamp's bicycle wheel does. This idea of my mobiles, if possible, functioning "in both directions" has occupied me greatly over the years. A large number of my pieces work in two directions (not just the moving ones), and many times in more directions than just two. One doesn't need to look further than "Domen" (The Dome), here in Tom Böttiger's collection, where the imperfect, present, and future coexist in a literally sealed artwork with greater inner dimensions than outer dimensions and with a more circular than square shape. Similarly, Mamma, pappa, barn is freed from a beginning and an end; everything is also in (kinetic) motion here, the sculpture can only incessantly display the combinations of facial features that reappear every time gravity orders the flaps to fall and continuously show the trinity that art consists of: the artist, the viewer, and the artwork - mother, father, child.
Dan Wolgers
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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