No Stars, But Stripes

Jacob Dahlgren
No Stars, But Stripes.

Attracted by minimalist tradition, Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren finds abstraction in everyday objects and often overlooked details of contemporary life, which he employs to create dynamic interactive installations and performances.

One of his preoccupations is an permanent performative exhibition on Instagram for which he wears a different striped T-shirt every day. Jacob hasn?t worn anything else since 2001. He even wears his striped T-shirts at funerals and weddings as he confessed us when we visited his studio.

With No Stars, But Stripes Collectors Agenda has curated a show with Jacob that is first taking place as a digital performance, taking over his Instagram feed, and will materialize into a physical show in Vienna in a few weeks.

The show is an ironic comment on the present societal state of mind in the United States under the Trump administration, as a nation struggles for a coherent identity and shared values. Dahlgren draws on his ample repertoire of striped T-Shirts to propose alternative formal expressions of the symbol American Flag that is vested with symbolism and references to virtues. In the tradition of Dahlgren’s obsession with stripes of course none of these designs include any stars.