Elmgreen & Dragset
The duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles will feature new and recent sculptures that invite visitors to enter an alternate reality. In this dreamlike presentation, the artists continue exploring enactments of doubling and coupling, and their new experimentations with scale lend the show an especially surreal quality—the figurative sculptures in the main gallery space will be realized at half their original size in the adjacent small exhibition space. The show will also include a new sculpture of a sleeping gallery assistant at the front desk and a black marble sculpture in the courtyard. Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition with Pace in Los Angeles follows their recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed Prada Marfa installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019–20); The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018–19); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2016); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); ZKM Museum of Modern Art, Karlsruhe (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Tate Modern, London (2004); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2001).
Their work has been included in the NGV Triennial, Melbourne, Australia (2023); Bangkok biennial (2018), Istanbul biennial (2013, 2011, 2001), Liverpool biennial (2012), Singapore biennial (2011), Moscow biennial (2011, 2007), Venice biennial (2009, 2003), Gwangju biennial (2006, 2002), São Paulo biennial (2002), and Berlin biennial (1998). In 2009, they received a special mention for their exhibition The Collectors, representing both the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Elmgreen & Dragset curated the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017.
Elmgreen & Dragset are renowned for their large-scale installations, including Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool presented first by Public Art Fund at the Rockefeller Center in 2016 and now installed at K11 in Hong Kong, Prada Marfa (2005), a full scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 the middle of the Texan desert, and Short Cut (2003), comprised of a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground, first exhibited in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, and now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In December 2020, the The Hive (2020) was installed permanently at Moynihan Train Hall, where it now welcomes visitors entering this renovated extension to Penn Station in New York. In Berlin, the artists won the German Government's competition for a “Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime,” which has been permanently installed in Tiergarten park since 2008 and their outdoor sculpture Statue of Liberty (2018) is permanently installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart.
The artists were shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000) and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2002). In 2012 Elmgreen & Dragset were selected for London’s Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square. In 2015, the artists received honorary doctorates at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and in 2020 they were awarded the B.Z.-Kulturpreis in Berlin.