Elmgreen & Dragset

Description

Elmgreen & Dragset’s constructed environments have been celebrated all over the world for their mischievous, cerebral, and accessible nature. This is the first comprehensive presentation of the duo’s work, from their early performative pieces in the late 1990s to their most recent public projects

Drawing from disciplines as divergent as institutional critique, social politics, performance, design, and architecture, Elmgreen & Dragset’s work reconfigures the familiar with characteristic and subversive wit. Their sculptures and installations, also known as ‘Powerless Structures’, have redefined what it means to experience art – the cover features their work Van Gogh’s Ear, a sculpture in the form of a swimming pool, which is located on Fifth Avenue in New York at the entrance to the Rockefeller Center.

This book includes all of their most significant projects, from the transformation of New York’s Bohen Foundation into a subway station in 2004, to the siting of a fake Prada boutique in the Texan desert in 2005, and the installation of the statue of a child on a rocking horse on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2012.

Martin Herbert is associate editor of Art Review and a regular contributor to publications such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art Monthly.

Jason Schmidt is a photographer, based in New York.

‘Across twenty-odd years of collaboration, the artist team of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have created a rangy, often memorable body of sculptural and installation work that oscillates between the melancholic and the glib, the subtle and the slapstick.’ – Jeffrey Kastner, Artforum

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