Pace Welcomes Elmgreen & Dragset

Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of Pace Gallery, announces representation of the Scandinavian artist collective Elmgreen & Dragset.

Since 1995, Elmgreen & Dragset—comprising Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway)—have had an artistic practice that combines sculpture, large scale installations, performance and numerous public outdoor artworks. Their work frequently challenges the way art is presented and experienced, as in their critically acclaimed project, The Collectors at the 53rd Venice Biennial in 2009, in which they transformed the adjoining Danish and Nordic pavilions into private homes, or in their exhibition, This Is How We Bite Our Tongue at Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2018, for which they turned the exhibition venue into a full-scale abandoned civic swimming pool. Through such acts of subversion, their works disrupt the normal conditions for perception, like “a grain of sand in an oyster,” as Elmgreen explains, “which creates a certain irritation that later can become a beautiful pearl.”

In this new relationship, Pace looks forward to collaborating with Elmgreen & Dragset’s existing galleries in Europe and Asia.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s first presentation with Pace will be in September as part of an outdoor sculpture program associated with the gallery’s temporary space in East Hampton. Pace will show Short Story (2020), an 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 question the fairness of the game. The work is a new outdoor version of an installation created earlier this year for Elmgreen & Dragset’s solo exhibition at König Galerie in Berlin, on view through July 26, 2020.

As an introduction to the gallery’s global audience, later this summer Elmgreen & Dragset will be in conversation with longtime friend, collaborator and fellow Pace artist Fred Wilson as part of the gallery’s ongoing digital conversation series hosted on Instagram ( (opens in a new window) @pacegallery).

Douglas Baxter, President of Pace Gallery, comments:

“As a fan of the work since their Venice installation, it has been exciting, and so much fun, getting to know Ingar and Michael and their work over the past few years. We at Pace are truly honored and looking forward to working with artists of such intelligence, depth and humor.”

Among the most renowned and widely exhibited contemporary artists in Europe, Elmgreen & Dragset’s works were the subject of a major retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2019. The same year, they inaugurated their permanent sculpture, Bent Pool in Miami Beach—an outdoor work conceived as a continuation of their monumental piece, Van Gogh’s Ear, which was commissioned by Public Art Fund in collaboration with K11 and shown on Rockefeller Plaza in 2016. That year the artists also held a solo exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York.

Learn more about Elmgreen & Dragset here.