Elmgreen & Dragset (collaborating since 1995) explore the blurred line that divides our public and private personas by investigating how we shift, perform and build our identities depending on the context. The duo cleverly unpack intimate subjects such as gender, sexuality, relationships, the balance of power and sociopolitical structures. Themes of powerlessness and interrupted functions have spanned their career, with clocks whose arms cannot move, doors that cannot open, stairs that have fallen apart, diving boards that are inverted and pools that have been emptied.
Through sculpture, public works and expansive installations, Elmgreen & Dragset create situations and fictitious characters in which entire worlds can be explored. As such, we are asked to immerse ourselves within the work, becoming both guests and participants within these carefully constructed realities.
Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) have staged numerous exhibitions around the world, including Musée d’Orsay (Paris), Amorepacific Museum of Art (Seoul), Centre Prompidou-Metz (Metz, France), Fondazione Prada (Milan), the Whitechapel Gallery (London), Museum Haus Lange at Kunstmuseen Krefeld (Krefeld), FLAG Art Foundation (New York), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), the National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), a public exhibition in connection with Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Centre (New York), as well as the Tate Modern (London). In 2009, Elmgreen & Dragset were awarded Special Mention at the 53rd Venice Biennale for their solo presentation The Collectors at the Danish Pavilion and the Nordic Pavilion. In 2017, they curated the 15th Istanbul Biennial.
The artists were shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum (2000) and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof (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.
