Born 1974 in Munich, Germany, based in Potsdam

Björn Dahlem in his work explores the connection between an aesthetic universe and scientific images of the world since the late 1990s. His installations, sculptures and objects are mostly made of emphatically simple materials that he transforms into precisely composed and visibly handmade forms incorporating selected objets trouvés. The structural complexity of his work is derived from the intricacy of the cosmological models and astrophysical theories from which he gleans his motifs. Dahlem uses subtle humor to link the scientific knowledge with the aesthetics of everyday life while questioning the suggestive power of the scientific construct of the world, whose fundamental relativity he allows to find its material equivalent in the fragility of his sculptures.

The title of the exhibition contains the promise that it will reveal a cosmic secret. Which of the numerous mysteries of the universe it actually concerns is, however, irrelevant. What is decisive is that Dahlem’s plastic poetry demonstrates its fundamental ability to give visual form to the small and large enigmas of the universe and astronomy. In the course of this, the artist focuses on the contradictory, the erratic and the hidden, as well as the voids and gaps in the context of human knowledge creation, and at the same time repeatedly makes allegorical references to our everyday lives and experiences. In this respect, the universe and its exploration function here not least as proxies. Dahlem’s sculptural images deal above all also with us, the humans, in the sense of an extended (self-)portrait according to all that we know and do not know about our extraterrestrial environment, the cosmos and its principles.