Pace Live

Elmgreen & Dragset in Conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh

Friday, Sep 12, 2025
6:30 – 7:30 PM
1201 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles

EVENT DETAILS

Elmgreen & Dragset in Conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh
Saturday, Sep 12, 2025
6:30 – 7:30 PM
1201 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles

Valet will be provided on 12th Street off South La Brea Avenue.

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Author Ottessa Moshfegh will join the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset for a Pace Live conversation on the occasion of their exhibition The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, on view at Pace in Los Angeles from September 13 to October 25.

Moshfegh and the artists will reflect on their mutual motivations and inspirations as well as their interest in exploring states of suspension, alienation, and the uncanny.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is an author and screenwriter from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona, her next three novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can arise if objects are radically re-contextualized and if normal modes for the representation of art are altered.

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 Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul (2024–25); Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024–25); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (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. Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.