Elmgreen & Dragset (b. 1961 and 1969) are a Berlin-based artist duo who have collaborated since 1995. Initially, their work centred on performances that challenged conventional exhibition formats, but it has since evolved to include immersive installation and sculpture. Through reconfiguration and displacement, their art draws attention to agencies embedded in everyday objects and spaces that define our public and private lives.
The artist duo is well-known for their radical transformations of museum and gallery spaces, as seen in The Collectors at the Danish and Nordic pavilions for the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009), Tomorrow at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2013), and Bonne Chance, which spanned nearly the entire Centre Pompidou-Metz building (2023). Among their most significant public sculptures are Short Cut (2003), featuring a Fiat Uno and caravan seemingly emerging from the ground – first exhibited at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan and now in the collection of the MCA Chicago; Prada Marfa (2005), a forever closed Prada boutique situated in the midst of the Texan desert along Highway 90; Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 (2012), depicting a boy astride a rocking horse, commissioned for London’s Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a full-sized swimming pool turned vertically, first displayed at Rockefeller Center, New York. Their sculptures and institutional exhibitions often invoke the audience’s participation, creating unexpected situations and environments. In recent years, they have held solo exhibitions at major art institutions such as the Amorepacific Museum, Seoul; Musée d'Orsay, Paris (both 2024–2025); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2023–2024); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019–2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018–2019); and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016).
‘Elmgreen & Dragset focus on the manifold relations between art, its surroundings, and the viewer, and, rather than provide answers, elicit and subvert our responses to contemporary issues such as shifting attitudes toward sexuality and gender, consumer culture, and gentrification.’
K. Jhala, ‘Intimacy and denial in equal measure’, in Art Asia Pacific Magazine, July/August 2022, p. 69
