Peter Dahl

We recognize Peter Dahl's green sofa from the series "Vårat Rum" ("Our Room") 1969, "Drömmar i soffhörnet" ("Dreams in the Sofa Corner") 1970, and "Kalles Dröm" ("Kalle's Dream"), 1971. These paintings that criticise society are aimed at the Swedish bourgeoisie: dreams and reality are mixed, so that the boundaries can be viewed as blurred. It portrays how a person's future dreams and integrity is put down by the economic and political powers. This was an ambitious attempt to find a common point with the public and their demands.

Peter Dahl himself commented on this series in 1992: "I exhibited the series "Vårat rum" at Galerie Prisma II on Sibyllegatan in Stockholm. This was in January 1970 and I presented it as a draft of a painted series. A draft, because I dreamed about creating a larger and more accomplished series with bigger and better images, as rich in content as a TV series - like Forsyte-sagan (The Fortyse Saga), although based on our society at the end of the 1960s. I was in a rush, because I feared that someone else would do so before me with a similar idea. Preferably, I would have wanted to paint a series directly on the walls of a grand venue, like a modern Albertus Pictor, because I realized that the series would split up when the exhibition was over.
I was quite desperate. The debate about art's purpose, or its lack of, had really gotten to me. Oil painting could sometimes feel ineffective in a world that looked the way it did and where you could already see so much on TV. New techniques and medias felt threatening. Through oil painting, subjects were painted by hand, which others let technology portray. Time consuming and going in the wrong direction. I should have gone into film- or TV-making instead. But this was what I was going to continue with, now that I had painted during my whole long life. I am quite old now, I felt, at thirty-give years old..." (From Folke Edwards, "Peter Dahl", 1996, page 69-70).