Björn Dahlem - Something Secret about the Universe (I always wanted to tell you)
28 Apr - 24 Jun 2023
Björn Dahlem
Black Hole (Heidegger Schwarzschild), 2019
Wood, lacquer, steel, aluminum, acrylic glass, cuckoo clock, lava stone
65 x 65 x 50 cm
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Copyright: Björn Dahlem
Black Hole (Heidegger Schwarzschild), 2019
Wood, lacquer, steel, aluminum, acrylic glass, cuckoo clock, lava stone
65 x 65 x 50 cm
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Copyright: Björn Dahlem
Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present its eighth solo exhibition with Björn
Dahlem. Under the title Something Secret about the Universe (I always wanted to tell
you), the artist, who lives in Potsdam, is showing a spatial installation in situ in which
various new sculptures are embedded.
Björn Dahlem in his work explores the connection between an aesthetic universe and
scientific images of the world since the late 1990s. His installations, sculptures and
objects are mostly made of simple materials that he transforms into precisely
composed and visibly handmade forms incorporating selected objets trouvés. The
structural complexity of his work is derived from the intricacy of the cosmological
models and astrophysical theories from which he gleans his motifs. Dahlem uses
subtle humor to link the scientific knowledge with the aesthetics of everyday life while
questioning the suggestive power of the scientific construct of the world, whose
fundamental relativity he allows to find its material equivalent in the fragility of his
sculptures.
The title of the exhibition contains the promise that it will reveal a cosmic secret.
Which of the numerous mysteries of the universe it actually concerns is, however,
irrelevant. What is decisive is that Dahlem's plastic poetry demonstrates its
fundamental ability to give visual form to the small and large enigmas of the universe
and astronomy. In the course of this, the artist focuses on the contradictory, the
erratic and the hidden, as well as the voids and gaps in the context of human
knowledge creation, and at the same time repeatedly makes allegorical references to
our everyday lives and experiences. In this respect, the universe and its exploration
function here not least as proxies. Dahlem's sculptural images deal above all also
with us, the humans, in the sense of an extended (self-)portrait according to all that
we know and do not know about our extraterrestrial environment, the cosmos and its
principles.
Björn Dahlem, born in Munich in 1974, studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Since 2017, he has been teaching as a professor for sculpture, object and installation at the Bauhaus University Weimar. His work has been shown in numerous institutions and major exhibitions at home and abroad, including La Triennale di Milano, Milan (2022), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2020), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea (2018); ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2017); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2015); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2014); MoCA, Taipei (2013). Currently, works by him are included in the exhibition It's a World Machine. Kepler, Art & Cosmic Bodies at the ERES Foundation in Munich.
Dahlem. Under the title Something Secret about the Universe (I always wanted to tell
you), the artist, who lives in Potsdam, is showing a spatial installation in situ in which
various new sculptures are embedded.
Björn Dahlem in his work explores the connection between an aesthetic universe and
scientific images of the world since the late 1990s. His installations, sculptures and
objects are mostly made of simple materials that he transforms into precisely
composed and visibly handmade forms incorporating selected objets trouvés. The
structural complexity of his work is derived from the intricacy of the cosmological
models and astrophysical theories from which he gleans his motifs. Dahlem uses
subtle humor to link the scientific knowledge with the aesthetics of everyday life while
questioning the suggestive power of the scientific construct of the world, whose
fundamental relativity he allows to find its material equivalent in the fragility of his
sculptures.
The title of the exhibition contains the promise that it will reveal a cosmic secret.
Which of the numerous mysteries of the universe it actually concerns is, however,
irrelevant. What is decisive is that Dahlem's plastic poetry demonstrates its
fundamental ability to give visual form to the small and large enigmas of the universe
and astronomy. In the course of this, the artist focuses on the contradictory, the
erratic and the hidden, as well as the voids and gaps in the context of human
knowledge creation, and at the same time repeatedly makes allegorical references to
our everyday lives and experiences. In this respect, the universe and its exploration
function here not least as proxies. Dahlem's sculptural images deal above all also
with us, the humans, in the sense of an extended (self-)portrait according to all that
we know and do not know about our extraterrestrial environment, the cosmos and its
principles.
Björn Dahlem, born in Munich in 1974, studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Since 2017, he has been teaching as a professor for sculpture, object and installation at the Bauhaus University Weimar. His work has been shown in numerous institutions and major exhibitions at home and abroad, including La Triennale di Milano, Milan (2022), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2020), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea (2018); ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2017); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2015); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2014); MoCA, Taipei (2013). Currently, works by him are included in the exhibition It's a World Machine. Kepler, Art & Cosmic Bodies at the ERES Foundation in Munich.