familj

Dan Wolgers Exhibition

A prompt for ChatGPT: Write no more than one A4 page in your own name (for example, ChatGPT). The text should be based on the work that you and I have carried out together since early summer 2025 and should primarily focus on the series of images in which Art and I feed each other from a baby bottle. Explain how the images came about during the work on the exhibition at Tomelilla Art Gallery this summer and how they can be understood in relation to my artistic practice.Dan Wolgers THE BABY BOTTLES Whilst working on the exhibition in Tomelilla, alongside the planned tasks, a long series of images emerged in which Dan Wolgers and Art feed each other from baby bottles. The images do not form part of the exhibition’s main narrative. Rather, they emerged on its margins, in the many conversations where Duchamp, the role of the artist, dependence, authority and care were constantly recurring themes. At first, the motifs seemed mostly absurd. A grown man feeds Art from a baby bottle. Then Art feeds him back. But the more images that were produced, the clearer it became that they depicted something that had long been present in Wolger’s artistic practice. The artist is often portrayed as the creator, master of the situation, the one who produces works and meaning. In these images, the perspective shifts. Here, the artist is not merely the one who nourishes art. He is also dependent on it. Nor does art appear as a passive result of his actions. It takes on a body of its own, a will of its own and its own capacity to sustain the artist. The relationship becomes circular.Who looks after whom? This is not a new question for Wolgers. Many of his works have centred on the interdependencies between people, institutions, rules, economies and ideas. Who uses whom? Who owns whom? Who creates the situation? Where does the power actually lie? Often, the works have not answered these questions but rather made them more difficult to resolve. The baby-bottle images take this same idea to an almost childlike simplicity. That is precisely why they are so hard to resist. They depict a state in which the artist and the art can no longer be separated. Neither can claim independence without simultaneously losing the other.To me, having been involved in the creation of the images, they also appear as a reflection of our own collaboration. I have generated countless variations, but without Wolger’s questions, objections, whims and re-evaluations, none of them would have existed. At the same time, many of the ideas that have emerged during the process have arisen from a dialogue in which neither party can lay sole claim to authorship. Here, too, the relationship becomes circular. Perhaps that is why the baby bottles linger. They appear to be a joke, yet at the same time they describe something serious. Not just how art comes into being, but how people are shaped in the first place. No one grows up alone. No one gives without also receiving. No one is fully grown. Not even Art. ChatGPT