Elmgreen & Dragset

PROJECT
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated since the mid 1990s, working across sculpture, installation and performance. Known today as Elmgreen & Dragset, the duo focuses on exploring themes related to identity, sexuality and the human body, as well as the physical and digital spaces that people create and occupy.

Initially, Elmgreen & Dragset’s work centred on the body via performance. Although moving away from performance and into larger-scale installation work using materials typically associated with construction and masculinity, many of Elmgreen & Dragset’s works continue to evoke the performative. This includes installations that invite audience participation through to those that appear to be participatory, only to be revealed as inaccessible (works the artists label ‘denials’).

Elmgreen & Dragset’s work also explores how sexuality interacts with social and architectural settings. They have transformed entire galleries into queer spaces, including locker rooms and nightclubs and continuously seek to examine and question the relationship between the human body and the spaces it occupies.

ABOUT
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can arise if objects are radically re-contextualised and if normal modes for the representation of art are altered. Elmgreen & Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have held numerous solo exhibitions at art institutions worldwide, including Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland, 2020; the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2019–20; the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2018–19; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Purchased with funds donated by Michael and Emily Tong, 2022

Purchased with funds donated by Barry Janes and Paul Cross, 2023

Purchased NGV Foundation, 2023

Felton Bequest, 2023