"Mom, Dad, Child" by Dan Wolgers from the Tom Böttiger Collection

Dan Wolgers

"Mom, Dad, Child"

"Mom, Dad, Child" represents one of Dan Wolgers' seminal works from his early years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s. Here, he explains the genesis of this piece:

– Through my first solo exhibitions, while I was still at Mejan, I experienced that my moving sculptures, with their clattering 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 derive its kinetic effect mainly from the relentless and regular laws of gravity (for which I take no responsibility). The result was "Mom, Dad, Child", where the round disc slowly rotates, causing the flaps with facial features to fall into place by themselves, and the faces continuously change identity (I had recently become a father for the first time). The effect may 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 initiated the ongoing series of moving sculptures that work the same regardless of the direction of rotation – "Mom, Dad, Child" work both ways, just like Duchamp's bicycle wheel. This idea that my mobiles should work "both ways" if possible, has occupied me throughout the years.