Sven Dalsgaard Sculptures

This unique, small bronze sculpture by Sven Dalsgaard, dated 1964, transforms an ordinary object into something psychologically charged and quietly ambiguous. Standing just 11.25 inches tall, the form recalls a chair lifted into an improbable vertical stance. Its narrow seat and elongated legs deny any practical use. What Dalsgaard presents is not furniture but the idea of a chair, reduced to structure and presence rather than function. The bronze surface is worked rather than refined, with visible traces of the artist’s hand that catch the light unevenly. This rough handling introduces a sense of vitality into an otherwise rigid form. The exaggerated proportions give the sculpture a totem-like quality, almost figurative in character, as if the chair itself has assumed an upright posture. As the viewer moves around it, the open spaces within the structure become as important as the solid bronze, creating a shifting balance between mass and void. There is a clear surrealist element in this transformation. The chair remains immediately recognizable, yet it no longer belongs to the world of ordinary experience. By displacing scale and function, Dalsgaard creates a subtle tension between familiarity and estrangement. The sculpture suggests presence without an occupant and purpose without use, encouraging psychological rather than literal interpretation. This aligns with a restrained, Northern strain of Surrealism, one shaped by austerity and understatement rather than spectacle. Signed and dated on the base, the sculpture dates from a period when Dalsgaard increasingly explored the symbolic potential of everyday forms. Modest in scale but rich in implication, it demonstrates how a common object can be quietly reimagined as a vessel for reflection, ambiguity, and poetic abstraction. A unique bronze sculpture. Born in Vorup near Randers, Sven Dalsgaard was self-taught as a painter. His earliest paintings are Naturalistic but around 1934 he was inspired by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee to paint more Abstract works. He debuted at the Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling in 1943. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp, he embarked on Surrealism in the 1940s but moved into a simpler, more stylized approach in the 1950s, producing tall thin sculptures...