Aurel Dahlgrün
TIDE
28.11.2021 – 16.01.2022

Born in Berlin, Aurel Dahlgrün (*1989) grew up in Sweden and spent some of his youth in Brazil. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Christopher Williams from 2011 to 2018. He received the Friedrich J.H. Schneider Scholarship in 2014, the Hogan Lovells Art Promotion Prize in 2015 and the Düsseldorf Ehrenhof Prize in 2018, followed by a solo exhibition at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf.

The 31-year-old conceptual artist works with photography and expansive installations. The leitmotif of his work is water, whose temporal and spatial properties he explores. Dahlgrün’s photographs are taken both from the air and underwater: “Dives often serve as inspiration. Above water, my gaze goes into the distance, and as soon as I dive down, everything is suddenly very close. I’m interested in the interplay between proximity and distance,” says the artist.

The site-specific exhibition “TIDE” in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven deals with the tides, to which the artist devoted himself intensively during his scholarship stay. Following on from the work “19 weeks of water” (2018), he is showing a large, shallow pool whose water surface reflects the space. The water used comes from the Weser estuary and is returned to it at the end of the exhibition. This creates a dialog between the interior of the Kunsthalle and the Weser outside. Another work that Dahlgrün is presenting in the Kunsthalle is the “Retina” series (2021): Works on paper that show imprints of water surfaces. The water used for the works was colored with printer’s ink and shredded photographs.

Curated by Klaus Becké.