Dan Wolgers

Mamma, pappa, barn (Mother, Father, Child) is one of Dan Wolgers' key works from his early years at the Royal Institute of Art in the early 1980s. Here, he explains how it came about:

Through my first solo exhibitions while I was still studying at Mejan, I had experienced that my moving sculptures, with their rattling and jerky components, had an unintentional and unwanted seductive effect on the viewer. I wanted to counteract this by creating a simple and calm moving sculpture that would primarily achieve its kinetic effect through the relentless and regular laws of gravity (for which I have no responsibility). The result was Mamma, pappa, barn, where the round disc rotates slowly, causing the flaps with facial features to fall into place on their own, and the faces continuously change identity (I had recently become a father for the first time). The effect can perhaps be likened to staring into a fire, similar to how Marcel Duchamp comments on the function of his rotating bicycle wheel on a stool. Perhaps it was with this sculpture that I began the ongoing series of moving sculptures that work regardless of the direction of rotation - Mamma, pappa, barn works in both directions, just like Duchamp's bicycle wheel does. This idea of my mobiles, if possible, functioning "in both directions" has occupied me greatly over the years. A large number of my pieces work in two directions (not just the moving ones), and many times in more directions than just two. One doesn't need to look further than "Domen" (The Dome), here in Tom Böttiger's collection, where the imperfect, present, and future coexist in a literally sealed artwork with greater inner dimensions than outer dimensions and with a more circular than square shape. Similarly, Mamma, pappa, barn is freed from a beginning and an end; everything is also in (kinetic) motion here, the sculpture can only incessantly display the combinations of facial features that reappear every time gravity orders the flaps to fall and continuously show the trinity that art consists of: the artist, the viewer, and the artwork - mother, father, child.

Dan Wolgers