Elmgreen & Dragset Past Oct 8 – Nov 15, 2020 East Hampton Featuring five recent and new works as well as an offsite outdoor sculptural installation, viewers of this presentation are invited to create their own narratives, responding to implied actions and emotions suggested in the selection of works, where traces of presence and absence are finely balanced and where gestures both bold and intimate are interwoven. Exhibition DetailsElmgreen & DragsetOct 8 – Nov 15, 2020 Gallery68 Park PlaceEast HamptonAbove: Installation view, Elmgreen & Dragset, Oct 8 – Nov 15, 2020, Pace Gallery, East Hampton © Elmgreen & Dragset PressPress Release Connect (opens in a new window) @pacegallery (opens in a new window) @elmgreenanddragsetstudio Among the most renowned and widely exhibited artists in Europe, Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) challenge and readdress how art is presented and experienced with an often playful and subversive approach. The artist duo pursues complex questions of identity, sexuality, and belonging in their work. Often radically re-contextualizing everyday objects or transforming exhibition spaces into unexpected new environments, Elmgreen & Dragset draw on both lived experience and the context in which their works are shown. 2020 marks the 25th year of their collaboration, which has continued to call into question established power structures in society and deal with fundamental, existential questions. Read More Elmgreen & Dragset, Couple, Fig.19, 2019, MDF, PVC, aluminum, stainless steel, 86-5/8" × 18-7/8" × 12-5/8" (220 cm × 47.9 cm × 32.1 cm), each Learn More On view in the exhibition is Couple, Fig. 19 (2019), part of an ongoing series of paired diving boards, which exemplifies this play with perception—shifting the role of the object by removing it from its functional setting and calling into question the significance of environment. The materiality of the work also defies the immediate reading of it as readymades, as each element is crafted by hand. Since their first diving board sculpture in 1997, the motif of a swimming pool has frequently appeared in their work. One key example was their 2016 installation Van Gogh’s Ear at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center in New York, which featured a large ear-shaped pool structure with an iconic, cyan-blue interior, lights, a diving board, and a stainless-steel ladder. Similarly, the duo’s Bent Pool (2019)—the 20-foot-tall installation in Pride Park outside the Miami Beach Convention Center—takes the form of an oval pool, bent upright into an inverted U-shape. Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Carousel slide 11 Carousel slide 12 Carousel slide 13 Carousel slide 14 Carousel slide 15 Carousel slide 16 Elmgreen & Dragset Couple, Fig.19 2019 MDF, PVC, aluminum, stainless steel 86-5/8" × 18-7/8" × 12-5/8" (220 cm × 47.9 cm × 32.1 cm), each Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Elmgreen & Dragset, Black Socks, 2019, aluminum, steel, lacquer, socks, 46-7/8" × 24-7/16" × 31-1/2" (119.1 cm × 62.1 cm × 80 cm) Learn More Elmgreen & Dragset’s Black Socks (2019) subverts traditional notions of objectification and desire. The visual appearance of this sculpture responds to Peter Hujar’s black and white photograph Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs) (1976) in both form and color. The position of the crossed legs of the sculpture is drawn directly from the subject in Hujar’s iconic work, and the colors of the sculpture mimic the black-and-white tonality of the photographer’s image. Just as queer experiences play a profound role in the work of Elmgreen & Dragset, Hujar’s work frequently and powerfully captured queer life in New York City. Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Carousel slide 11 Carousel slide 12 Carousel slide 13 Elmgreen & Dragset Black Socks 2019 aluminum, steel, lacquer, socks 46-7/8" × 24-7/16" × 31-1/2" (119.1 cm × 62.1 cm × 80 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Elmgreen & Dragset, Untitled, 2014, bronze, MDF, lacquer, 23-5/8" × 51-15/16" × 24-7/16" (60 cm × 131.9 cm × 62.1 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Elmgreen & Dragset Untitled 2014 bronze, MDF, lacquer 23-5/8" × 51-15/16" × 24-7/16" (60 cm × 131.9 cm × 62.1 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Elmgreen & Dragset, Doubt, 2019, polished stainless steel, Oriol, aluminium, bronze, lacquer, 64-15/16" × 33-7/16" × 17-11/16" (164.9 cm × 84.9 cm × 44.9 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Carousel slide 11 Carousel slide 12 Carousel slide 13 Carousel slide 14 Carousel slide 15 Elmgreen & Dragset Doubt 2019 polished stainless steel, Oriol, aluminium, bronze, lacquer 64-15/16" × 33-7/16" × 17-11/16" (164.9 cm × 84.9 cm × 44.9 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Elmgreen & Dragset, Circulation, 2019, stainless steel, t = 4, Ø 100 cm (weight: 16kgs) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Elmgreen & Dragset Circulation 2019 stainless steel t = 4, Ø 100 cm (weight: 16kgs) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back As part of the presentation Pace will also show Short Story (2020), a new outdoor installation situated on a tennis court incorporating two figurative bronze sculptures of young boys following the conclusion of a tennis match—one victorious, the other defeated. The expressions of the figures invite viewers to call into question the idea of competition and its reverberations in society, and more broadly the nuanced notion of situational fairness and outcomes. Read More Installation view, Elmgreen & Dragset: Short Story (detail view), Oct 8 – Nov 15, 2020, Pace Gallery, East Hampton © Elmgreen & Dragset Tied to the exhibition, Pace will also debut a conversation between Elmgreen & Dragset and friend, collaborator, and fellow Pace artist Fred Wilson as an introduction to the gallery’s global audience.Pace’s presentation will coincide with Elmgreen & Dragset’s new solo exhibition, (opens in a new window) 2020, at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland. On view September 25, 2020 through January 17, 2021, the exhibition features a selection of site-specific, new, and familiar sculptures by the artists, presented together in a format that transforms Finland’s largest museum into a surreal car park, incorporating real cars, road markings, and a selection of Elmgreen & Dragset sculptures—several of which are seen for the first time. The melancholic, half abandoned parking lot that makes up the exhibition seems to beg the question: What will happen to intimacy after 2020, a year of social distancing and heightened fear of sharing physical space?Other recent solo exhibitions include Elmgreen & Dragset: Sculptures at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, which was presented from September 2019 – January 2020 and marked the artists’ first major museum presentation in the U.S. Installed throughout the interior and exterior spaces of the Nasher, the works on view exemplified the artists’ use of multiple aesthetics and working methods, and drew upon Minimalism, conceptual strategies, and the figurative sculpture tradition. Read More Elmgreen & DragsetElmgreen & Dragset have been described as subtly infiltrating art institutions from the inside with their critical gaze, frequently using museum and gallery architecture as both subject and material, laying bare the social and cultural systems that expose the fiction of neutrality trafficked by the white cube. “…But instead of using the traditional methods of institutional critique we rather change the identity and the actual physical appearance of the white cube” says Dragset. Elmgreen & Dragset have used such a strategy on numerous occasions. At UCCA in Beijing they turned the vast exhibition hall into a whole art fair mimicking a conventional fair layout with gallery booths in a fishbone grid, a café, a bookstore and an information desk, but only displaying works by themselves which were not for sale. In Seoul, Elmgreen & Dragset turned Samsung Museum of Art’s venue Plateau into a dysfunctional airport, and outside Marfa, Texas, they erected perhaps their most well-known project: Prada Marfa, a forever closed luxury boutique in the middle of the Texan desert.Learn More