As Prada Marfa Turns 20, Artists Elmgreen & Dragset Open Their Most Surreal Exhibition Yet

Entering the Berlin studio of installation and performance artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset is a curious, immersive experience. For 10 years now, the duo has worked in a towering warehouse in the city’s now hip Neukölln district. A marble statue of a pointing child greets you on the way in; a crane has been converted to hold an overhead office space; and their 14-person team gathers daily for lunch in an open kitchen. When I meet them, they are a day away from shipping the final sculptures and paintings to Los Angeles for their forthcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery, “The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.”

Picture an installation anchored by a (silicone) gallery assistant asleep at her desk; a sculpture of men in VR goggles, holding each other in a tender embrace; and a series of circular paintings of the sky embedded with mirrors to create a kind of optical illusion. Each of these works will appear at Pace LA twice: first at full scale and then—in a second room where the ceiling is half as high—at half scale.

The exhibition references a neurological disorder called Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS). “When the person suffering from it is very exhausted, they can’t scale things, so things might appear bigger or smaller than real life,” explains Elmgreen. “That was the trigger for making the show, our inspiration source. Then we thought, What do we do for a show in LA in 2025 in this crazy world that is more absurd than our wildest dreams?” (The arrangement also presented an amusing challenge to its white-cube setting: “How will the gallery market this?” Dragset muses with a laugh. “If it’s half size, is it half-price?”) The novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, whose 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation saw a nameless protagonist doing everything she could to sleep her way through her life (and a blue-chip art gig), will join the artists for a talk at the gallery on Friday.

(opens in a new window) Continue reading at vogue.com.