page_title: Elmgreen & Dragset
section_title: Life and work
hierarchical_section_title: Elmgreen & Dragset / Life and work
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Elmgreen und Dragset, Van Gogh's Ear, New York 2016
context_page_description: Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. Their work explores the relationship between art, architecture and design.
  Elmgreen & Dragset live and work in Berlin. They are known for art work that has wit and subversive humour, and also addresses social and cultural concerns.
context_section_description: The duo met in Copenhagen in 1994, when Michael Elmgreen, who was born in the city in 1961, was writing and performing poetry, and Ingar Dragset, a Norwegian born in 1969, was studying theater. They started collaborating in 1995 and moved to Berlin in 1997. In 2006, they bought a large 1000m² former water-pumping station dating to 1924 in Berlin’s Neukölln borough from the city and converted it into a studio. In 2008, Elmgreen moved to London, and in 2015, he moved back to Berlin.
  Since 1997, the artists have presented a great number of architectural and sculptural installations in an ongoing series of works entitled 'Powerless Structures' in which they transformed the conventions of the 'white cube' gallery space, creating galleries suspended from the ceiling, sunk into the ground or turned upside down. For the Istanbul Biennial in 2001, they constructed a full-scale model of a typical Modernist Kunsthalle descending into the ground while located outdoor among ancient ruins. Their work has also been shown in the Berlin, Istanbul, Liverpool, Moscow, São Paulo, Singapore, Gwangju Biennials.
  Further exhibitions include transforming the Bohen Foundation in New York into a 13th Street Subway Station in 2004; their best-known project Prada Marfa, a Prada boutique inaugurated in 2005 and sited in the middle of the Texan desert; and their exhibition The Welfare Show in 2005-2006 at Serpentine Gallery, London / The Power Plant, Toronto / Bergen Kunsthall, Norway / BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, which was critically acclaimed.
  For the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 they curated the exhibition The Collectors in the neighboring Danish and Nordic Pavilions (which include Norway, Sweden, and Denmark), an unprecedented merging of two international exhibition venues. For their show, they invited fellow artists Maurizio Cattelan, Tom of Finland, Han & Him, Laura Horelli, William E. Jones, Terence Koh, Klara Lidén, Jonathan Monk, Nico Muhly, Norway Says, Vibeke Slyngstad, Thora Dolven Balke, Nina Saunders, and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others.
  In 2011, their sculpture Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 was chosen as the winner of the Fourth Plinth Commission to be displayed on the Fourth plinth of London's Trafalgar Square. Their bronze sculpture of a boy astride a rocking horse questions the tradition for war monuments to celebrate either victory or defeat. The work is now permanently installed outside the Arken Museum of Modern Art.
  In 2013 they curated an extensive public art program in Munich entitled “A Space Called Public/Hoffentlich Öffentlich” and transformed the former textile galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum into the grand family home of fictional architect Norman Swann. Their exhibition series “Biography” took place in 2014–2105 at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo and the SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. In 2015 their exhibition “Aéroport Mille Plateaux” turned the PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul into an airport inspired by the ideas of philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
  For their solo exhibition “The Well Fair” in 2016, the duo transformed the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing into a fictional art fair. Also in 2016, the artists installed Van Gogh’s Ear at Rockefeller Center in New York; the 9-meter (30-foot) high, empty swimming pool stands upright on its shortest side, supported by a visible construction on its backside.
  The artists’ first major overview in the UK, “This is How We Bite Our Tongue” was held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2018. The exhibition consisted of a large-scale site-specific installation and a survey of their sculptural works. The Whitechapel Pool, realised specifically for the show, transformed the ground-floor of the gallery into an abandoned public swimming pool fictionally dated to 1901 and related to the gentrification of the East End of London.
caption: Van Gogh's Ear, 2016, in New York City's Rockefeller Center
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