Kristian Dahlgaard Writing on the Wall

The title suggests that something foreseeable is about to happen – clear in hindsight but unrecognized in the moment – and thereby 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.

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.

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, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand, Herning Art Museum, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, among others. Dahlgaard is part of several major collections such as SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, New Carlsberg Foundation, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Collection Nobel & Hug in Zürich and Anni & Otto Detlefs Fonden.