Dan Wolgers

Early in his career, in the late 1970s, Wolgers made small objects of wood and metal mechanically rigged to misbehave: machines that refused the standardised rigour of machines. Poetry and mathematics converged in these works, where the factual literalness implied by his titles was consistently undermined by a delicate absurdism. That tension - between the serious and the absurd, between the institutional and the individual - has remained the engine of his practice ever since.

By the early 1990s Wolgers had emerged as one of the more provocative figures on the Swedish art scene, working in a tradition that traces back to Marcel Duchamp. In 1991 he commissioned an advertising agency to mount an exhibition entirely in his name, without supervising any aspect of it. In 1992 he was invited to redesign the Swedish national telephone directory, and the result - featuring only his own name and number across its 1.1 million copies - flooded his studio with calls for months. That same year, invited to participate in a group exhibition, he chose not to produce any new work. Instead, he quietly removed several pieces by other artists from the venue, along with assorted furniture, and sold them to the Stockholm Auction House. His sole contribution to the exhibition was a small plaque bearing his name. He was charged, tried, and convicted - and then sold the sealed verdict to a Norwegian collector.

In 1990, before these actions brought him wider notoriety, Wolgers participated in Aperto at the 44th Venice Biennale. He later taught at Konstfack (1993-1995) and held a professorship at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (1995-1998). Major retrospectives followed at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm (2001) and at Spritmuseum, Stockholm (2016), where the author Lena Andersson curated the selection and contributed a text to the accompanying publication "Egentligheter: Om konst och filosofi". His series "Här slutar allmän väg" (1995) - large photo enlargements of the familiar road sign marking the boundary between public and private land - is among his most discussed bodies of work, held at Moderna Museet and elsewhere.

Wolgers is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kiasma, Helsinki; and Malmö Museum, among others. On the auction market his work has appeared mainly at Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with a record price of approximately 82,000 USD achieved at Bukowskis in 2014 for "Här slutar allmän väg III". The 16 works indexed on Auctionist span prints, sculptures, and multiples, with Bukowskis Stockholm accounting for the largest share of appearances.