Elmgreen & Dragset document a life in progress at Galerie Perrotin
When last we encountered architect Norman Swann he was between bankruptcy and his 75th birthday, still stubbornly ensconced in his family home - a grand residence that shared an address with the Victoria & Albert Museum. The ornery bachelor, now 76, has recently traded South Kensington for New York's Upper East Side, where he has downsized to a single splendid room - double-height, dentil moldings, crimson walls - in a landmark 1930s building on Madison Avenue. Until 23 May, visitors are welcome to barge in and snoop around.
'Be a not-so-polite guest - sneak into his private stuff!' encourages Michael Elmgreen, one half of the Danish-Norwegian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, as he reaches for a leather-bound photo album resting not far from a half-drunk cup of tea. 'The more you look at things, the more curious you will get.'
Despite the ephemera of a life in progress - personal photos (handsome young men, gorgeous buildings) and correspondence, shelves of well-thumbed books (Foucault, Proust, a 39-volume set of Shakespeare's complete works in miniature) and stacks of yellowing magazines - Swann is not a real person. He is the creation of Elmgreen & Dragset and his bedroom is their latest solo exhibition, on show at Galerie Perrotin.
Entitled 'Past Tomorrow' and accompanied by a short book written in the style of a screenplay, it picks up where the artists' 2013 V&A installation left off, with Swann realising he has little more than maquettes to show for a life that prized utopia over reality, theory over practice, dogmatism over compromise.
'We were jealous that filmmakers could focus on a few characters and comment on society through those fictional characters, so that's what we've done over the last few years - look at different characters and try to tell their stories and also our stories through their objects, their collections, all of the traces they leave in a domestic setting,' says Ingar Dragset. 'It's quite rare to make a sequel in an art context, but we're always up for a new challenge.'
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