The objects and things that fill our daily lives are often ones we only notice if they stop working, or if they inconvenience us in some way. The cakes that haven’t risen, the cables that don’t connect or the weeds growing through the crack in the path – all will receive our full attention only when they become a nuisance.

But currently at Pace, London, these items and more are celebrated as things of beauty in their own right, with the group exhibition ‘Monument to the Unimportant’ spotlighting the joy in mundanity. Artists including Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread recontextualise the quotidian to create something wholly new.

‘Artists return to everyday objects because they’re universal and endlessly revealing,’ says Karine Haimo, senior vice president at Pace. ‘The things we barely notice, such as food, furniture, domestic tools, quietly shape our lives. When artists alter scale, material, or context, the familiar becomes strange again, and we’re prompted to look with fresh attention. The works in “Monument to the Unimportant” show how powerful that shift can be. A cake, a pretzel, or a hot-water bottle might seem trivial, but in an artist’s hands they become ways to talk about culture, the body, memory, and the rhythms of daily life. The mundane offers a shared language.’

Looking at these items, left without anyone to operate them, bereft and useless, seems faintly ridiculous, ultimately emphasising our own vulnerability. In Genesis Belanger’s sculptures, the human’s presence is implied so deeply we feel like they must have just rushed away, leaving the phone dangling off its hook behind them. ‘Each object has the ability to tell a story about a person, culture and society,’ says Belanger. ‘It’s not so much that the context changes the meaning of an object, as it provides the space for the meaning to be revealed. A hot water bottle in your medicine cabinet may be invisible, but in a gallery it reveals its allegorical potential.’

It is a narrative made even more literal by Elmgreen & Dragset. In Powerless Structures, Calvin Klein underwear and black Levi’s are strewn on the floor, kicked off by their invisible wearer. ‘In our daily lives, we surround ourselves with myriad mundane objects, be they in our homes or within the public sphere, that we tend to overlook or take for granted without any further reflections upon what they actually represent,’ the duo say. ‘In order to break through the conventional readings of such ordinary items, you have to look at them from a new perspective, so that both the desires and the control mechanisms embedded in their designs can be revealed once again.’

Taken as a whole, the exhibition is unsettling, rooted in the uncanny and hard to place. ‘Many pieces seem immediately recognisable, but they reveal something new the longer you look,’ adds Haimo. ‘An ironing board reflected in chrome or a pair of intertwined urinals shifts from literal object to something more open and poetic. I hope people leave the exhibition with a heightened awareness of the things around them. The “unimportant” is never actually unimportant; it’s where our habits, histories, and emotions live. If visitors start noticing the everyday with more curiosity, that’s the real impact of the show.’

‘Monument to the Unimportant’ at Pace, London until 14 February 2026, pacegallery.com

As Art Basel Paris 2025 arrives, the city pulses with ideas and artistic encounters – from Kai Althoff’s enigmatic new paintings at Tramps’ inaugural Paris space to Dash Snow’s intimate Polaroids at Morán Morán, and Turner Prize-winner Helen Marten transforming the Palais d’Iéna with 30 Blizzards., a hybrid installation-performance mapping human experience through sculpture, video, and live performance.

Elsewhere, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou reimagines a harp shop as a melancholic study of urban solitude, while at the Lycée Turgot, Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake explore the poetic intersections of light, fabric, and technology through guided tours and workshops. There are also radical publishing and book launches, with Pina magazine celebrating its second issue – featuring an exhibition by Forensic Architecture – at an event hosted by After 8 Books at Paris Internationale.

At night, don't miss the Berlin-based curatorial platform Trauma, throwing an evening of music, art and performance on 23 October at U122AE, the subterranean club located at 13 Rue de Belhomme. And beyond the main fair, make sure to visit Place des Vosges, 7 Rue Froissart, and Paris Internationale – art fairs that bring together some of the most exciting artistic voices in contemporary art working worldwide today.

Ten things to see at Art Basel Paris 2025

Tramps: Kai Althoff

Inaugurating the Tramps gallery space, Kai Althoff returns to Paris with a compelling new presentation following his recent exhibitions in the city at Galerie Hussenot and Modern Art. The second chapter of an exhibition first presented at Studio Casoli in Filicudi, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptural objects, and carefully arranged photographic excerpts on partition walls, which present the artist’s working process and magnify the delicate, thorny beauty embedded in the paintings themselves.

Althoff is one of the most revered painters of his generation and has long explored the intertwined realms of persona, memory, and materiality. His dense, elliptical compositions hover between devotion and delirium: expect interiors filled with fragile figures, faded fabrics, and cryptic symbols, each fragment hinting at a whole that may never be fully seen, a central provocation to Althoff’s practice. This iteration of the exhibition reflects the urban nature of Paris, contrasting with the airy openness of its summer counterpart in Italy.

Passage du Caire, 33 Rue d’Alexandrie, 2e arrondissement. Open until 7 December, Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00–19:00

Dash Snow: ‘Carrion’ at Morán Morán, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig

Morán Morán inaugurates its new Paris project space with ‘Carrion’, a survey exhibition of American artist Dash Snow’s (1981–2009) Polaroid photography, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig. A chronicle of early-2000s New York, post 9/11, and pre-social media, ‘Carrion’ captures a world of skaters, party-goers, squatters, and hipsters navigating sky-rocketing consumerism, jingoism, and celebrity mania.

Born into the prominent de Menil family, Snow moved between subculture and art-world royalty, and tragically died of a drug overdose in 2009 at the age of 27. Drawing connections between Snow and Baudelaire’s fascination with beauty in decomposition, in ‘Carrion’, Ugelvig positions the artist as both a prophet and a romantic whose work translates the finality of the analogue era. Far from mere downtown legend, Snow’s photographs document the fragile poetics of modernism and their grainy analogue quality captures a world on the brink of digital domination.

5 Rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris, from 21 October – 29 November 2025

Eugene Kangawa x A-POC Able Issey Miyake

The collaboration between Japanese artist Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake represents a dialogue between visual art and design-led textile research. Emerging from a three-year exchange between Kangawa and A-POC Able’s creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the project originates in Kangawa’s ongoing painting series Light and shadow inside me (2021-), first seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Presented in a scenography conceived by Paris-based architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the installation foregrounds a newly developed ‘bit-level fabric’ that shifts from black to white through woven density, rather than with dye. Displaying test pieces, prototypes, and working tools alongside Kangawa’s related works, the exhibition also includes guided tours by Kangawa and Miyamae, along with an on-site workshop. The exhibition is an evolving archive of artistic and technological collaboration that will continue in Tokyo and Osaka later this year. Admission is free, although booking is required.

Lycée Turgot, 40 Rue Volta, 75003 Paris. From 24–25 October (11:00–19:00); 26 October (11:00–18:00)

Cheruby x Viscose Journal: ‘Fashion Sensorium’

This week, Paris is focused on visual art, but Viscose Journal turns up the volume on something rarely given space at an art fair: sound. The independent journal for fashion criticism launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, and has built a cult following for its rigorously edited, concept-driven topics that critically dissect fashion and the fashion industry.

Now, for its Paris launch of Issue 08: Sound (alongside a reprint of Issue 07: Scent), Viscose and the Shanghai-based collective Cheruby transform the Paris Internationale fair into a live experiment in sensory thinking. On 24 October, they will feature Thai sound artist Tanat Teeradakorn, who presents newly commissioned works exploring how style might be heard rather than seen, translating texture and rhythm into acoustic form. Alongside Teeradakorn, Swedish scent collective Store Skuggan presents Monkeyflower, a perfume inspired by a once-fragrant flower that mysteriously lost its scent, a poetic meditation on loss, mutation, and extinction.

Paris Internationale on 24 October

Helen Marten: ‘30 Blizzards.’, presented by Miu Miu

For its second year as Public Program Partner of Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu presents 30 Blizzards., a new commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten. The installation-performance hybrid unfolds across five sculptural platforms and corresponding video works, tracing a loose meteorology of human experience through childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, and loss.

Marten is known for her linguistically charged assemblages and use of symbols, and at Palais d’Iéna extends her exploration of how language inhabits material form, constructing what she calls a ‘map of emotion’ in 30 Blizzards. Developed with theatre director Fabio Cherstich, whose practice spans experimental opera and scenography, and sound artist Beatrice Dillon, the performance introduces 30 characters conceived less as actors than as semiotic systems, gestures or weather fronts in human guise.

Palais d’Iéna, Paris, 22–26 October (Preview: 21 October)

Airbnb x Art Basel Paris: ‘A Curated Experience with Loïc Prigent’

Following their 2024 collaboration, Airbnb and Art Basel continue their partnership with a new series of immersive cultural experiences across the fair’s global editions. In Paris, the initiative takes shape as an intimate, guided encounter led by Loïc Prigent, known for his sharp-eyed documentaries (Signé Chanel, The Day Before); a journalist and satirist, he has become famed in the fashion world as one of the most witty commentators.

As part of Art Basel Paris’ ‘Oh La La!’ programme, curated by Prigent, a selection of galleries will rehang their booths midweek, reframing their displays in response to the fair’s evolving energy over the week. Prigent’s tour offers rare insight into this process, combining his humour and cultural fluency with behind-the-scenes conversations with artists and gallerists, and access to the fair’s Collectors Lounge.

The collaboration underscores how Airbnb and Art Basel are reimagining hospitality as a form of cultural mediation and where access, curiosity, and conversation replace exclusivity. With limited spots still available for Friday’s session, this experience promises a uniquely Parisian blend of insight and wit: an art-world tour guided by one of its sharpest chroniclers. Book your place on the tour here.

Massimodecarlo Pièce Unique: Elmgreen & Dragset

Visible through the street-facing vitrine day and night, a new installation work depicts a gallery assistant slumped at her desk behind an open laptop. She’s exhausted. Part performative mise-en-abîme, part allegorical mirror, Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation confronts passersby with the ambiguities of labour, visibility, and institutional ritual. Is she asleep, disengaged, or quietly protesting? The absurdity is both humorous and unnerving, a hallmark of Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice, and echoes Prada Marfa (2005) and their 2024 Musée d’Orsay exhibition ‘L’Addition’, where inverted male figures disrupted traditional hierarchies.

October 2025 compresses these concerns into a single human proxy, a microcosm of gallery life that collapses critique and fiction, and asks what remains unseen in the everyday theatre of display. The gallery’s Instagram captures passerby reactions that are as telling as the work itself.

57 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris in October 2025

Marietta Mavrokordatou: ‘Downtown Blues’

Situated in the Viaduc des Arts, a repurposed railway viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, an area known for its artisanal ateliers, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou presents ‘Downtown Blues’ in The Harp Store, in which she constructs a spectral interior where painting, video, and sculptural debris converge to evoke Paris as both subject and symptom: a city perpetually haunted by its own image. Mavrokordatou is known for her innovative approach to photography, often employing macro lenses and experimental optical techniques to reflect her own visual impairment into her work. The resulting soft-focus, near-abstract images resemble eyes, landscapes, or interior spaces, collapsing the distinction between self-portraiture and perception itself. These works operate as acts of translation, turning the instability of sight into a metaphor for the instability of memory, identity, and collective vision.

In ‘Downtown Blues’, she extends this inquiry to the architecture and aura of Paris, creating an installation that feels both cinematic and introspective. Having previously exhibited with Brunette Coleman in London and elsewhere internationally, Mavrokordatou continues her rigorous investigation into how the spaces we inhabit shape and mirror our inner lives.

The Harp Store, 107 Avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris. Opens on 22 October

Barbara Kruger x Performa x Item Idem: ‘The Drop’ (2025)

Few artists have defined the visual politics of our time like Barbara Kruger, whose bold typographic works, red, white, black, and defiantly feminist, have shaped how we see power and persuasion in art. To mark Performa’s 20th anniversary, Kruger’s Untitled (The Drop) returns with Item Idem as a limited series of multilingual apparel featuring her signature slogans, now translated into French and Arabic.

Originally conceived for Performa 17, the project moves from billboard to body, transforming critique into circulation. Oversized jumpers and tees emblazoned with statements like ‘Your gaze hits the shirt’ turn the act of wearing into a form of dissent. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg, Performa has long expanded performance into the social sphere – and here, art becomes commerce’s mirror: proof that a T-shirt can still be a political gesture.

Opening on 20 October, 12pm (online and in-store at Item Idem, Paris)

No Tax: Reba Maybury & Lucy McKenzie: ‘Pervert or Detective?’

Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, this incisive exhibition brings together Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie in a provocative exploration of power, authorship, and erotic labour. Within No Tax’s arcade-like vitrines, murals, drawings, and collaborative works stage acts of control and complicity: Maybury, whose practice merges political domination with visual art, directs her submissives to create under her command, probing masculinity, labour, and authority. And McKenzie, known for her intricately detailed trompe-l’œil paintings and architectural interventions, investigates authenticity, illusion, and institutional power.

At the exhibition, buy a copy of Pervert or Detective?, a publication by Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie, which presents an extended conversation between the artists, moderated by Marie Canet, and published by No Place Press (MIT Press). With essays and an afterword by Susan Finlay, the book extends the exhibition’s themes. Together, the show and publication reveal the intertwined dynamics of eroticism, labour, and artistic creation, making this a must-see exhibition for those interested in power, performance, and authorship.

More info here.

38 Rue St Sabin, 75011 Paris. 21 October – 9 November. Opening and Book Launch: 21 October, 5–9 pm

In 2018, the Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset – known through their work as Elmgreen & Dragset – transformed London’s Whitechapel Gallery into a derelict swimming bath, its central pool drained of water and dusted with debris as if long abandoned (there was even the faintest scent of chlorine lingering in the air). A comment on the effect of austerity politics on public institutions – particularly in the rapidly gentrified East End of London – such was the power of the illusion that you wondered if it had, in fact, been hidden there all along.

These artistic tricks have been a hallmark of the Berlin-based duo’s work: there has been a life-sized sculpture of a Prada store in the desert of Marfa, Texas; another swimming pool, turned on its end and erected at New York’s Rockefeller Centre; and a lonely art-fair booth in Paris’ Grand Palais, built a month before the opening of that year’s FIAC, as if the pair had got their dates mixed up. Destabilising the everyday, they use these projects to reveal the machinations of power that exist around us, often unnoticed. ‘Sometimes the most profound “truth” can occur in the most banal images,’ the pair told Wallpaper* at the opening of ‘L’Addition’, a 2024 exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, which saw of series of uncanny figures interspersed among the museum’s permanent collection.

Prada Mode London: ‘The Audience’ by Elmgreen & Dragset

A new work, titled ‘The Audience’, provides the centrepiece of Prada Mode, the Italian fashion house’s roving ‘private members’ club’ that invites artists to create site-specific works and curate a programme of events, talks and lectures (this marks its 13th iteration). The previous edition took place earlier this year in Abu Dhabi, curated by the American artist Theaster Gates, while this latest edition opened for previews yesterday (15 October) in London’s Town Hall, a recently inaugurated cultural space close to King’s Cross in the former Camden Council Town Hall (interiors are by Tom Dixon, while Virginia Damtsa is curating its programme).

Opening to coincide with Frieze Week, the immersive installation sees the Town Hall’s vast main room transformed into a 104-seat cinema, occupied by a series of hyper-realistic human figures posed in ‘various states of attention’ – from an embracing couple to a woman consuming popcorn on the front row (another potent visual trick, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and work out which of the seated figures are real). Their glassy eyes, all rendered from silicone, are fixed on the cinema screen: on it, a distorted film plays on loop, as if watching a scene from a movie through a perpetually blurry lens.

‘When people come into the installation, [we want them to feel] like they’re too late for the cinema,’ the artists explained at a preview yesterday. ‘We all know this feeling, when you are there at the last minute and everyone is seated already, and you need to sneak in and find your seat. [It’s why] we’ve made just one scene, that feels like it's taken out of a bigger movie – you don’t know when it starts and when it ends. No matter when you arrive, you come in in the middle of the movie.’

The film itself depicts an animated conversation between partners – a painter and a writer – who discuss the potential challenges of their respective mediums. And, while their voices can be heard clearly, the visuals are purposefully blurred – the duo liken it to watching a film without glasses, or as if waiting for a video to buffer and load online. ‘We are experiencing image overload through social media, our news feed,’ they say. ‘So instead, we wanted people to see abstract images, just moving against the screen. We used the blur to obscure the visibility of what was going on.’

The choice of a cinema auditorium – which, over the course of the week, will double as a space for a curated series of talks, lectures and screenings – is part of their continuing desire to interrogate the everyday spaces we occupy. ‘We thought it would be interesting to focus on the cinema as a communal space, a place where people gather,’ they say. ‘It is not an algorithm that decides who you are with. You never know who you will be next to.’ (Here, that includes the hyper-realistic figures, who will occupy the cinema’s seats throughout the week, interspersed among the physical attendees.)

‘This whole build-up with the seats, the steps, and the handrails is not normally here, it’s just an open space,’ they say. ‘What we have so often done with our installations is transform spaces – when we do museum shows, we want to give them a different identity than their normal white boxes, [whether] with swimming pools, airport lounges, or private homes. This time, we thought it would be fun to make a movie theatre that would only be here for five days – one where you are never alone.’

Prada Mode is open to the public from 16-19 October 2025.

You can register at Prada’s website.

From Laura Marling to Antony Gormley, Mickalene Thomas and St. Vincent – this year we have criss-crossed the worlds of art and culture to speak to the best in the business. Here are extracts from some of our favourite conversations. Click through to read the full interviews.

Top ten art and culture interviews of the year

Antony Gormley

People, for whatever reason, do associate me with the body – I think that's fair enough,’ says Antony Gormley when we catch up over Zoom, as he prepares to open his New York art exhibition ‘Aerial’ at the city’s White Cube. ‘But I am, and always have been, as interested in the body of the viewer as I am in mine, as an example of a human body in space.’

It is a preoccupation he is building on in ‘Aerial’ through sculpture, which references his earlier considerations of proprioceptive environments we have seen in the cave-like Room, the immersive Blind Light and in the Breathing Room drawings. ‘They are all attempts to somehow catalyse space itself and make environments in which the viewer’s body is invited to sense its own movement through time and space,’ Gormley adds. ‘And you could say that there are a number of works that do both. Take Model, Space Station, Cave – all of those are, as it were, buildings, but made with reference to the form of the body that you can actually enter and move through. And I'm continuing that line of thought.’

Read the full Antony Gormley interview

St. Vincent

Since the release of her 2007 debut album, Marry Me, the Texan-born, guitar-shredding St. Vincent has continued to reinvent herself, dabbling in synth-pop, hard rock and everything in between. Like Bowie before her, she’s played with, and prodded at, the idea of persona. For the release of 2017’s Masseduction – a time she calls her ‘dominatrix at the mental institution’ era – she dressed only in latex, insisting journalists interview her (decidedly prickly) alter-ego inside a neon pink box. During 2021’s Daddy’s Home, she was a louche, 1970s gangster, in a flared two-piece and blonde bob wig. And for mockumentary The Nowhere Inn, directed by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, she portrayed a heightened (and hideous) self-obsessed version of herself. ‘It wasn’t great for my career,’ she notes, dryly.

Read the full St. Vincent interview

Mickalene Thomas

American artist Mickalene Thomas sensually subverts Black female representation throughout history in works that draw on an eclectic roster of references. Now, her major new touring exhibition, ‘Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ (currently at The Broad in LA and travelling on to Philadelphia and London later in 2025), featuring more than 80 works created over the last 20 years, nods to Thomas’ desire to imbue the sensual and sensitive figures she portrays with a joyful positivity, with a title referencing feminist author bell hooks’ canonic text of the same title.

‘I am constantly drawing inspiration from representations of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and the tenets of Black feminist theoretical writings,’ says Thomas. ‘Authors and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins have always provided supportive context for my work, in particular, and of course, bell hooks.’ These broad references are reflected in the multidisciplinary nature of the works themselves, which utilise a mix of materials in her distinctive collage style. ‘Collage is such an intricate means of discovery and exploration of all my ideas,’ she says. ‘It’s a way to learn and unlearn within my own process, and a way to anchor and make sense of my compositions. I enjoy rebuilding and the essential peeling back of layers to get to the core of my ideas. Collage does this for me.’

Read the full Mickalene Thomas interview

Laura Marling

In autumn 2016, Laura Marling was playing a run of shows in the American Northwest and West. Starting in Washington state, the English singer-songwriter moved on to Oregon and then down to California. ‘Me and my friend, who was on tour with me, were going down the coast,’ Marling recalls of a journey that took them from Mill Valley, to Santa Cruz, to Santa Barbara. ‘And we were losing so much money on the tour that we were staying in campsites. It's not a boo-hoo story, it was fun to do,’ she clarifies with a smile. ‘It was nice weather. But we were in tents – well, a single tent.

‘We didn't have much cash, but we bought some lino and some really nice card and we started designing sigils [tarot-inspired prints]. We would make 15 of them and sell them at the shows, and then that would be enough money for the campsite and the petrol for the car.’ The sigils were made as linocuts – ‘so they're easily repeatable’ – and were postcard-sized, signed and dated. Marling charged $10 for each.

Read the full Laura Marling interview

Olivia Erlanger

‘Both in school and at home, I was indoctrinated with an ideal of American exceptionalism where progress is linear, and each succeeding generation will be more prosperous than the last,’ says New York-based artist Olivia Erlanger, who is featured in 2024’s Wallpaper* USA 400. ‘This didn’t match with reality. I came of age during the introduction of the personal computer, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the advent and parasitic spread of reality TV, the global financial crisis of 2008 – events that have promoted the spiralling and fracturing of that promised progress. But dreams are boring. Delusions are more interesting and more powerful as make-believe frequently turns into reality.’

Read the full Olivia Erlanger interview

Kenia Almaraz Murillo

Bolivian-born textile artist Kenia Almaraz Murillo is rethinking weaving’s traditional reputation with work that zigzags across mediums and references. In her new London art exhibition, Murillo adorns her wall hangings with found, urban objects, from car headlights to motorbike headlamps, brilliantly lit up with curves of neon.

‘In my work, each piece bears witness to a specific encounter, whether it be with an animal, a landscape, a star, a myth, a legend, a story,’ says Murillo. ‘My approach is one of paying homage. I have a great admiration for living animals, and the animals of myths and legends. I try to make them come alive through my threads and to almost relive those precise moments when the discovery took place.

Read the full Kenia Almaraz Murillo interview

Rachel Feinstein

‘It’s very emotional for me to have a show in Miami,’ says Rachel Feinstein, speaking on the eve of her major new exhibition at The Bass Museum of Art. Spanning almost three decades of work by the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, the retrospective – the first in her hometown – celebrates and questions society’s embrace of artifice, particularly prescient when considering Miami’s reputation for decadence. ‘It’s got these crazy extremes, between good and evil, dark and light, male and female, and it’s all been very unconsciously important to me,’ she says. ‘And then, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve done a lot of work on dream therapy and it’s become more important. So Miami is the key to all of that, the basis of everything I do.’

Read the full Rachel Feinstein interview

Wayne McGregor and Max Richter

Sir Wayne McGregor is the master of creative collaborations. As resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet in London, a position he has held since 2006, he has translated an eclectic roster of literary, avant-garde and contemporary references into works for the stage (along with costumes in collaboration with Grace Wales Bonner and with Burberry), as well as taken the helm on film, TV, fashion and music videos projects, and founded his own London-based studio.

His latest project is an adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of novels, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, into a three-act ballet. The project marks 16 years of his partnership with composer Max Richter, whose haunting, post-classical music is the soundtrack to Atwood’s post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Read the full Wayne McGregor and Max Richter interview

Elmgreen & Dragset

As Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset bring a smart subversion to their large-scale installations. Over the last three decades, they have taken a sideways look at social and political systems by recontextualising mainstream motifs: works have included a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique in the Texan desert and a vast, vertical swimming pool, now installed in Hong Kong.

This playful mindset underpins a major new show at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which, for the first time in its 38-year history, is staging a contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ (until 2 February 2025) considers the effects of recontextualisation alongside a figurative rethinking of classical motifs, with Elmgreen & Dragset’s works taking their cue from the 19th-century sculptures in the museum’s permanent collection. Here, though, they strike an uncanny tone. Look again at the apparently traditionally styled and crafted works and you begin to spot subversive details: a classical figure appears to be wearing headphones, another a VR headset, and could that one be playing with a drone?

Read the full Elmgreen & Dragset interview

John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. In new work for the Venice Biennale this year, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah dissects a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.

‘I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he says. ‘It’s about acknowledging connections with other species, and each other. We’re cautioned to listen to rising water levels, CO2 emissions – there are a lot of voices begging to be listened to. It felt like a good moment to just bring up some of the past. [The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’

Read the full John Akomfrah interview

Melina Keays, Entertaining Director

'I am in Guadalajara in Mexico and tried eating crickets for the first time. Insect protein is going to feature in all our lives in the near future so I thought I might as well get going. The verdict: they’re really quite nice (as are most things when fried and salted). There’s no particular flavour other than being fried, salty and crispy, and a brief moment of hesitation before I put the first one in my mouth was allayed by thinking of them as tiny lobsters.'

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture & Environment Director

'Last weekend, a group of friends, family and myself dined at Canto73. It’s a lovely, quite low-key supper club with seasonal recipes, currently housed in a location near Highbury Fields. The food was delicious and the chef explained all his dishes and the thinking behind them – it made for a great foodie evening.'

Jack Moss, Fashion Features Editor

'Going by my iPhone screenshots, this week’s obsession has been Paloma Wool, the Barcelona-based label designed by Paloma Lanna that she describes as “exploring the art of getting dressed”. Her not-so-long-ago launched menswear collection is the best kind of fashion – the kind that feels at once familiar and just a little bit strange. Case in point: her V-neck argyle ‘Gips’ sweater, which looks straight off a 1990s Gus Van Sant protagonist and is just about convincing me to leave behind my typical baggy knits for something more shrunken (also on my wishlist are the studded light-denim Crowd jeans and Pibot baseball tee). On the subject of knitwear, I’m also eyeing up London-based &Daughter’s first menswear outing – it’s the type of collection where you’re hard-pressed to pick a single piece (hence why the brand made Wallpaper’s list of the very best knitwear brands in the world, which we revealed last month). If I did have to choose, though, it would be the Balla V-neck sweater, which comes in the perfect shade of grass green.'

Hannah Silver, Arts, Watches & Jewellery Editor

'This week I took my oldest daughter to get her ears pierced for the first time. She doesn't know how lucky she is to have a jewellery editor for a mother (despite me frequently telling her) but it did come in handy, as I knew to go to Astrid & Miyu in London's Spitalfields: heaven for an 11-year-old girl. Their gentle and friendly manner and selection of earrings with which to get pierced show how far we've come from the days of heavy, boring piercing jewellery.'

Sofia de la Cruz, Travel Editor

'The Silver Birch, situated in leafy west London, is a small neighbourhood restaurant with big ambitions. As a local to the area, it had been on my list ever since it debuted in the AA guide with three rosettes last year – I finally had the chance to experience it first-hand a couple of days ago. Coincidentally, the restaurant has recently been awarded London Restaurant of the Year by the AA Hospitality Awards, and for good reason. Within a serene and inviting space courtesy of studio B3 designers, The Silver Birch marries traditional British flavours with modern flair. Head chef Nathan Cornwell proposes playful, fine dishes like an emulsion of Devon crab, pickled apple and caviar served with sourdough crumpets or a warming delica pumpkin accompanied by chanterelle, cavolo nero and autumn truffle. Don't miss the sensational cocktail list or the hearty desserts.'

Hannah Tindle, Beauty & Grooming Editor

'I just arrived back in London from an overnight trip to Margate, the home turf of Formerly Known As Haeckels (FKAH). A group of us were invited to celebrate the natural beauty brand's new chapter: alongside a temporary name change, there's also been an overhaul of its visual identity and sustainable packaging. After taking a tour of Anya Gallaccio's exhibition at Turner Contemporary, FKAH's in-house nutrition lead served lunch. Then, we partied into the night at local bar Off Licence. (This morning, I was revived by breakfast at Fort Road Hotel, FKAH's Algae Plump Serum and Eco Marine Cream and a couple of ibuprofen.)'

Tianna Williams, Editorial Executive

'This week I had the pleasure of tucking into a festive meal at Akub. Located in Notting Hill, the Palestinian restaurant was founded in 2023 by Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan. He serves up tempting dishes on ceramic restaurant crockery (that's also available to buy) by Nur Minawi – a Jaffa-based third-generation Palestinian ceramicist. From succulent lamb shank to aubergine doused in pine nuts and pomegranate seeds, these delicious dishes are now available to recreate at home via his debut recipe book Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food, an ode to the resilience of community through troubled times.'

Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

'November is particularly packed for live music in London. On Tuesday, it was the turn of mid-aughts, Cali do-wop punk quartet Shannon & The Clams, who, on US election night, apologised profusely for their ‘crusty, embarrassing country’. Then came Los Bitchos, a cross-continental instrumental band of four women who play a blend of cumbia, funk and indie. And on Saturday, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the Prince of Darkness, Nick Cave, take over The O2.

With Amyl & The Sniffers, MJ Lenderman, Julien Baker, Magdalena Bay, Fontaine's D.C. and Charli XCX still to come this month, one of these snazzy new coffee machines, might be an essential purchase.'

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

A last-minute weekend in Paris for a close friend’s 30th birthday quickly transformed into an escape to the city’s most captivating corners. First stop: the Pinault Collection in the Bourse de Commerce. The exhibition, showcasing Arte Povera icons like Jannis Kounellis, Marisa Merz, and Alighiero Boetti, felt as much a feast for the eyes as the building itself – a breathtaking alliance of concrete and space.

Next, Elmgreen & Dragset – our November 2024 issue cover artists – unveiled their playful and poignant exhibition ‘L’Addition’ at Musée d’Orsay. The duo’s installations turn the museum space into a living narrative of modern life that embodies their signature wit and innovation.

A visit to Palais de Tokyo introduced ‘Tituba, Who Protects Us?’, a group exhibition featuring Rhea Dillon’s powerful work. Among the highlights were Myriam Charles’ evocative film installation, Cette Maison, and Massabielle Brun’s beautifully crafted installation, both of which enhanced the show’s exploration of protection and resilience.

I also took in ‘Figures’, a stunning large-scale immersive mural exhibition that redefined the space with its vibrant, expansive visuals, making a bold statement on the intersections of art and architecture.

For a taste of Parisian culinary charm, I stopped by Brasserie Martin for a bite and visited the nearby bookstore, Les Mots à la Bouche. Here, I picked up a few travel-sized books, including Abdellah Taïa’s new novel, Les Bastions des Larmes.

As the Eurostar whisked me back to the UK, I carried with me not just memories, but a renewed sense of inspiration – Paris, once again, proving to be the perfect antidote to any seasonal slump.

Taking a hard turn from its traditional role as the custodian of mainly 19th-century French art, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is staging the first contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ is an exploration of depictions of masculinity by Elmgreen & Dragset that draws on the museum’s collection of figurative sculptures, reinterpreted in new work by the Berlin-based artists. As our newsstand cover suggests (and that’s a silicone model of a small boy, by the way), it’s an audacious and, at times, disorientating undertaking, one that profitably pits the present against the past – a process discernible in work created by other artists that feature in this month’s Art Issue.

Take Rachel Feinstein, for instance. For the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, capturing the wild extremes of her hometown involves creating vast panoramas that are rife with historical rococo and gothic influences. Or this month’s Dakar Biennale, where a new generation of designers in Africa and its diaspora are showing work that links old and new – like the Marrakech-based Younes Duret’s reinterpretation of a teapot that, he says, reflects a fusion between tradition and modernity.

Our limited-edition cover features the first foray into fashion by Jony Ive’s design studio LoveFrom, which has collaborated with Moncler on a collection of jackets that can be mixed and matched with a single down-filled base layer. Here, too, the designer wrestles with the past. Ive tells our Milan editor Laura May Todd that, during the five-year development process, he ‘became obsessed with buttons. It’s an idea that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and maybe it’s perfect, but as a designer, you want to challenge that assumption.’

Buttons; a thread: finding connections is at the beating heart of this issue, an idea brought vividly to life by the collaboration between composer Max Richter and choreographer Wayne McGregor, whom you can find in conversation in our article, and the union forged between fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and artist Christiane Kubrick (wife of the late master of modern cinema), whose work we are honoured to document in a series of unforgettable images shot at the Kubricks’ Hertfordshire manor house. Eyes wide open? Good. Enjoy the issue.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 10 October, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

As Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset bring a smart subversion to their large-scale installations. Over the last three decades, they have taken a sideways look at social and political systems by recontextualising mainstream motifs: works have included a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique in the Texan desert and a vast, vertical swimming pool, now installed in Hong Kong.

This playful mindset underpins a major new show at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which, for the first time in its 38-year history, is staging a contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ (opening 15 October 2024) considers the effects of recontextualisation alongside a figurative rethinking of classical motifs, with Elmgreen & Dragset’s works taking their cue from the 19th-century sculptures in the museum’s permanent collection. Here, though, they strike an uncanny tone. Look again at the apparently traditionally styled and crafted works and you begin to spot subversive details: a classical figure appears to be wearing headphones, another a VR headset, and could that one be playing with a drone?

Elmgreen & Dragset on ‘L’Addition’ at Musée d’Orsay

Building on 2022’s ‘Useless Bodies’ exhibition at Fondazione Prada (W*277), where Elmgreen & Dragset’s figures were paired with figurative sculptures dating from 300BC to the 19th century, here the duo use the contrast between old and new as the backdrop for a consideration of masculinity. In juxtaposing the classical and the modern, they trace its representation throughout the timelines interwoven in the Musée d’Orsay’s historical halls.

‘In ‘L’Addition’, we explore different depictions of masculinity, particularly those that have been underrepresented or written out of art history,’ say the artists (who were interviewed by email and speak as a duo). ‘Our sculptures express the vulnerability linked to growing up and forming an identity. The figures deal with traditional notions of masculinity and the struggles associated with trying to fit into a heteronormative world where the masculine role has not evolved as much as other identities have.’ They point out that many of the sculptures in the museum’s collection portray sensitive versions of masculinity, creating a conversation with the introduction of their own contemporary pieces, rather than a clash.

‘Of course, a lot of progress has been made and, fortunately, many people’s understanding of gender and sexuality is much more fluid and complex today. The acceptance of non-binary identities represents real progress. But, at the same time, we are experiencing a concerning regression among some conservative-minded men who feel lost amid the shifts in society. They simply don’t know what their role is today, so they tend to cling on to outdated, repressive ideas of power. It sometimes still seems like there is a long way to go in redefining masculine roles, so it is urgent to keep on pushing.’ Fittingly, the exhibition runs concurrently to ‘Caillebotte. Painting Men’, which focuses on 19th-century artist Gustave Caillebotte, his predilection for masculine forms, and the arresting modernity of his male portraits.

At the Musée d’Orsay, Elmgreen & Dragset’s works play with neoclassical materials and forms, but their figures are frozen in leisure – listening to music, launching a drone into the air or engrossed in VR – on the precipice of worlds we can’t access. This is taken literally in the case of a boy who stands at the end of a diving board, contemplating the vast hall of the Musée d’Orsay below, or figuratively in the isolation of those lost in a world of music, with the technology they clutch seemingly an extension of themselves. Cut off from us, we are asked to imagine their situation – what are they listening to, watching, feeling? – forcing us to confront our own assumption of their identity and who we consider they are.

‘The meeting between our figures and those from the permanent collection feels natural,’ the artists say. ‘However, our sculptures have certain contemporary signifiers, like street clothes or headphones, that firmly place them in the present day. Many of the 19th-century pieces in the nave are figures interacting with objects such as books and musical instruments. We specifically created some sculptures to mirror these gestures, but with a modern twist, incorporating gadgets like VR goggles or a drone. Some of these figures might appear contemplative, lost in thought or perhaps in technology. Since the audience can’t know what these figures are listening to, or what they are seeing behind their VR masks, they might project their own interpretations on to them.’

Works are almost indistinguishable from the classic pieces. Created from a mix of materials, from silicone to bronze, they either encompass a hyper-reality or mimic historical forms. Disconcertingly, you never quite know which one to expect. ‘One of the works, a hyper-realistic silicone figure of a boy drawing in front of a monumental painting, could easily be mistaken for a real child, perhaps a pupil left behind by his teacher and classmates,’ explain the artists. ‘Others, in marble or bronze, might more noticeably be in conversation with the works around them and play with people’s expectations of a figurative sculpture. A realistic-looking sculpture made of silicone, real hair and clothing versus marble evokes distinct associations, and viewers react to them differently.’

Many of the figures are young, lost in play, a nostalgic childhood captured through the shadowy lens of memory. ‘In general, we try to create artworks that express certain emotions, conflicts and developments that are relevant to our own lives.

Looking back in this way also helps us to better understand our current and evolving selves,’ they add. ‘Ever since creating our sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse for the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square in London in 2012, we have continued to revisit the theme of upbringing in our practice. Over the last decade, we have reflected more on childhood, a formative and overwhelming time when one encounters so many norms and expectations for the first time. But with each new generation, there is room for progress and hope.’

The quotidian, and our instinctive commitment to maintaining the order of the everyday, is explored here, too. ‘Cleaning rituals, and domestic life in general, have been subjects for artists for centuries. In one work, called Laundry, the washing machine serves as a kind of plinth for the seated sculpture. To us, there is something reassuring and very human about this work. Technology may have improved our lives, but we are still bound to our bodily routines, basic needs and, for now, our physical, ageing selves. Sometimes the most profound ‘truth’ can occur in the most banal imagery.’

Neither artist received a formal art education and, consequently, they are keen to leave works open to interpretation, the latest step in a career defined by questioning accepted norms in the art world. ‘For one of our early pieces, we embedded a white cube gallery into the ground. It almost resembled an open grave and empowered the spectator, positioning them above it. Eventually, we started altering art spaces themselves. Today, we often restage an entire exhibition venue into a different kind of setting so it resembles – to name a few examples – an office landscape, an airport or a hospital ward. By changing the spatial settings in which we present our works, we hope that the audience can experience both the art and the venue in a new way. At Orsay, we are not completely transforming the space, but we will alter a part of this iconic hall quite dramatically.’ 

‘L’Addition’ is on show from 15 October-2 February at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, musee-orsay.fr, elmgreen-dragset.com

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 10 October, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Windowless walls, made of zigzagging aluminium panels; an impossibly sleek kitchen consisting of repeating geometric units, inspired by the work of Donald Judd; a custom ring-shaped conference table, with a slender marble top and tubular stainless steel supports that bend outwards to offer limited seating. These are some of the defining features of Elmgreen & Dragset’s latest fictional home, installed in Nord gallery of Milan’s Fondazione Prada. Over the years, inspired by the ways in which domestic spaces can express our identities and desires, the Berlin-based artists have created many detailed installations that evoke the lives of imaginary inhabitants – art collector Mr B, whose corpse lay adrift in the pool outside their Venice Pavilion; the elderly architect Norman Swann, disillusioned by professional failures and soon to be evicted from his grand apartment at the V&A; an unnamed family that has just emigrated from the UK back to Germany in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, taking up residence at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Haus Lange. In comparison, the fictional owner of the Fondazione Prada home is even more eccentric and elusive. His belongings suggest enormous wealth and power, but also considerable paranoia.

This point is driven home by a vitrine that houses four artworks: a pair of shrouded heads locked in a kiss, a miniature easel with a peephole that reveals an eye, an egg-shaped silver vessel intended as a resting place for a pair of smartphones (created for Wallpaper* Handmade X), all by Elmgreen & Dragset; plus a black leather-clad bust by Nancy Grossman with an open zipper around its facial features. Our protagonist has shut these symbols of desire behind glass, in the same way he has turned away from the real world and sealed himself in a hermetic bubble.  

And as the furniture reveals, this is no bubble of comfort. There’s a custom artificial leather bench with a side profile that resembles a cardiogram, and a tempered glass lounger by Konstantin Grcic with a backrest precariously supported by a gas piston. ‘It’s probably the most impossible chair ever designed, and therefore we love it,’ pronounces Michael Elmgreen, as we walk around the freshly installed home in late January. ‘It’s a comment on people arranging their domestic space into more of a showroom than a place for recreation and comfort. We’ve done this to the extreme here – everything is extremely uncomfortable, but it looks really good. Because if we continue to go down our current path in the way we organise our homes, this is what we’ll end up with very soon.’

This minimalist home is part of the artist duo’s new exhibition, ‘Useless Bodies?’, one of the most ambitious thematic investigations realised by the Fondazione Prada to date. As the title suggests, it ponders on the marginalisation of the body in the post-industrial age. Our homes are optimised to serve as social media backdrops, rather than to provide physical refuge; we are reduced to data points to feed the beast of Big Tech. We see this on a digital screen within the home that displays various statistics about our protagonist – his heart rate, stress levels, number of likes accumulated on social media; ‘all these things that have to do with our narcissistic perception of being perfect bodies’, says Elmgreen. 

These statistics overlay an image of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quatro Stato, 1901, one of the earliest paintings ever made of a worker’s strike and a clarion call against extractive capitalism. Its dignified portrayal of working-class protesters suggested an inexorable march towards a more equal society – a promise largely unfulfilled. Corroborating this sense of disappointed hope, an easel props up architectural plans for what appears to be a combination of an art museum, free port, and panopticon prison, a reminder that the trappings of civilisation are often enabled by prerogatives of the wealthy and the exploitation of the poor.

‘I don’t know if this home resembles a bomb shelter or a spaceship,’ remarks Dragset. ‘But for the rich, it will of course be one or the other in the future.’

Apart from a Unitree A1 robot dog (which is programmed to walk around the home and wiggle, offering visitors a dash of dark humour), there is no sign of activity within the 585 sq m home. As we approach the exit, we see the pièce de résistance – a grid of steel mortuary drawers, one of them left open with a pair of pale male feet jutting out, presumably belonging to our protagonist. It’s meant to be at once disconcerting and reassuring. ‘This is the only real democratic thing in our whole way of living,’ Elmgreen explains.

While the home in the Nord gallery presents a near-future vision of a one-percenter’s lair, another installation, occupying the upper level of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Podium building next door, shows the engine room of plutocracy. Aluminium foam walls and fluorescent strip lighting lend the space a corporate, clinical atmosphere, which inspired the artists to transform it into a contemporary office. On one end is a 2006 piece, It’s The Small Things in Life That Really Matter, Blah, Blah, Blah. Initially conceived for their seminal ‘Welfare Show’ at Serpentine Gallery, it comprises a number dispenser, an electronic number display, a row of seats and other accoutrements commonly found in a waiting area.

On the other end, the artists have crammed in a mammoth new work, Garden of Eden, 2021, comprising 35 office cubicles (each offering workspace for two) neatly arranged into seven rows. There are computers, desk chairs, as well as small personal items that evoke the lives of individual workers: here’s a kitschy gadget, there’s a postcard from a family holiday to Tenerife, reflecting the desire to shape one’s environment however soulless the corporate workspace may be. It calls to mind the artists’ 2010 installation The One & the Many, a four-storey housing block within the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe that offered brief glimpses of its tenants’ lives – here, grey Maharam fabric partitions have replaced prefabricated concrete, but the weight of conformity continues to loom heavy.

As with the Nord gallery, there are no inhabitants in sight. The office looks as if it has been hastily abandoned, calling to mind Covid-era lockdowns, but the artists in fact conceived Garden of Eden long before. It was intended as a comment on the throttling effects of capitalism, and the constant need to optimise space (workers are squeezed into tighter and tighter quarters, so employers can get more bang for their buck), though in light of recent events, it can also be read as a memorial to times past.

‘We can perhaps say, we won’t miss this office set-up, because it wasn’t optimal to work in that way,’ reflects Dragset. ‘But on the other hand, it’s a sad memorial because we’ve lost our togetherness, the social dimension of being in a workspace together.’

Proving his point, a readymade water cooler stands nearby, filled with water from Flint, Michigan, where ongoing lead contamination became a symbol of inequality and political failure. After years of clean-up, the city’s water was scientifically proven to be potable in 2019, but its notoriety lingers, so the artwork title Flint Water is enough to give us pause. It also raises the question of how the experience of the Covid pandemic may have lasting damage on our psyche, to an extent that we can never look at the gathering of our physical bodies in the same way again.

One floor down, the artists have gathered physical bodies nonetheless, only in the form of sculpture. Here, iconic works such as He (Silver), 2013 (a male version of the famous Little Mermaid statue on Copenhagen’s waterfront), and For today I am a child, 2016 (a boy gazing at a rifle that has been encased in a glass vitrine, a vision of a world beyond gun violence) intermingle with more recent pieces, many produced during the Covid pandemic. Notably, a boy on an umpire’s chair (Watching, 2021) highlights the ways in which we have been relegated to observers rather than participants in society, and a pair of young boys wearing VR goggles (This is How We Play Together, 2021) bemoans the toll of digital technologies. They are placed in dialogue with older sculptures, from Greco-Roman to Bertel Thorvaldsen and Luigi Secchi, that defy conventional representations of heroism and masculinity. The duo selected these pieces in response to Fondazione Prada’s inaugural show in 2015, which emphasised triumphant portrayals of idealised bodies within classical sculpture.

‘The more we looked, we saw that there are quite a lot of links between the Greco-Roman tradition and our sculptures, that even we ourselves weren’t aware of,’ says Elmgreen. ‘Classical and neoclassical sculpture is in fact rich in representations of normal citizens, more body types and more effeminate postures.’ To highlight the contemporary relevance of these representations, the artists have developed a system of cross-references, juxtaposing these pieces with their own work and positioning the sculptures in unusual ways – for instance, an athlete appears to be hiding within a metal frame rather than using it as a pedestal.

Positioning and recontextualising are integral to the practice of Elmgreen & Dragset, who once set up a Prada store in the middle of the desert (Prada Marfa, 2005, is a pilgrimage spot for art lovers and remains one of the artists’ best-known works). On the grounds of the Fondazione Prada, near the entrance to Restaurant Torre, they’ve installed The Outsiders, 2020, depicting two male art handlers made out of silicone, snuggled up against each other among packed artworks in the back of a Mercedes-Benz W123 wagon from the 1970s. Originally envisioned for Art Basel, it is a reminder of the unacknowledged and often deliberately hidden human labour behind the art world’s pristine façade.

The final part of the show takes up the Cisterna, a trio of spaces that contained enormous cisterns back when the Fondazione Prada had been a gin distillery. The artists have transformed these into a forsaken spa, with a locker room on one end and an abandoned pool on the other. In the former, some of the locker doors are left ajar, revealing objects that once again invite us to imagine the personalities and lifestyles of their owners. In one of them, a pair of briefs is suspended on a hook, underneath it is a pair of white flip-flops, neatly arranged as though on a shop floor; in another, an FFP2 mask and a pack of aspirin. A particularly messy locker reveals a small heap of rumpled clothing, a full ashtray, and a used espresso cup atop a torn packet of sugar. There’s also an empty locker with its interior entirely clad in 24-carat gold leaf, a reference to OMA’s gold cladding for the Haunted House at Fondazione Prada.

Further spa and changing room-related sculptures populate the space, including a massage bench where a life-size silicone figure of a naked man lies prone, covered only by a white towel over his hips. Despite its title, The Touch, 2011 does not include the figure of a masseur, giving the impression of eternal purgatory. Alongside, we see a pair of sinks connected with a twisting pipe, a pair of wooden doors linked with a security chain that would prohibit either from fully opening, and two pairs of rumpled jeans and some underwear that seem to have been recklessly discarded in a steamy rendezvous. Meanwhile, the empty pool, reminiscent of the artists’ installation at Whitechapel Gallery in 2018, is littered with debris and incongruously adorned with a bronze car seat, and a lacquered aluminium rock on a trampoline. 

The space in the middle is also the last one visitors see as they exit the exhibition, and it’s empty at ground level – we have to look up to discover the final artwork, What’s Left, 2021, showing a young man, clinging on to a wire with his right hand to prevent himself from falling, and clutching a balancing pole in another. With this piece, the artists want us to ponder, ‘should we really try to come up on that wire again and continue? Or should we just give up, loosen the grip and see if we will survive or die?’

Dragset adds that this is a commentary on our physical existence, as well as on political ideology. There’s a 1990s look to the young man’s attire, alluding to the optimism of the West following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the words ‘What’s Left’ on his T-shirt are the artists’ commentary on how capitalism has failed us. We have been disappointed, but are nonetheless unable to come up with a viable alternative. 

It’s a nerve-wracking note on which to end a disquieting exhibition. But don’t call the artists pessimistic. ‘It’s important to note that the show is titled “Useless Bodies?” with a question mark. Our answer, if any, would be no,’ Elmgreen concludes. ‘It’s an exhibition that we hope will encourage viewers to say, we need better spaces for our bodies, we need to put less pressure on our bodily appearances. And we need to be accepted as bodies and not only minds, to remind ourselves of the value of being physical beings.’ 

INFORMATION

A version of this article will appear in the May 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands and available to subscribers from 7 April. Subscribe today

Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘Useless Bodies?’, until 22 August, Fondazione Prada, Milan. fondazioneprada.org; elmgreen-dragset.com

There’s a painter at work in the street-facing ground-level gallery at Pace New York, visible to passers-by on West 25th Street. He stands in front of a sizable white canvas, pristine save for a single, sweeping black stroke that evokes a tyre mark, applied with a spatula that he still holds in one hand. His back is turned to us, and we are left to guess at his facial expression, but his assertive bearing and insouciant attire – a pair of jeans, sans shirt so his muscular back and shoulders are on view – suggest supreme confidence.

The Painter, Fig 1, as he is called, is one of twelve pieces (ten of them new) that Elmgreen & Dragset have included in their solo exhibition, ‘The Nervous System’. While the Scandinavian artist duo’s previous works have depicted a boy astride a rocking horse for London’s Fourth Plinth, and forlorn teenager seated on a fire escape, this is a man in his prime, a postcard picture of heroism inspired by old photos of Wilhelm de Kooning in his East Hampton studio. But their current show is not a paean to abstract expressionism: any impression of nostalgia is quickly disrupted by a smaller artwork in the same space, a pair of wellington boots (in patinated bronze) ridden with holes. ‘They’re a symbol of our pathetic efforts to protect ourselves from climate change, and how we can’t turn the tides if we’re not changing our behaviour completely,’ explain the artists.

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, 2021 by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

We encounter more disquieting images as we step into the main gallery. A boy gazes out of a lightbox display that masquerades as a window. Earlier in the year, the artists created a similarly configured piece called Offline, a poignant reflection on pandemic living, in which the boy presses his hands against the perspex and appears to yearn for ‘something that can’t be found inside or a reality other than the one we find online’. The new work takes on more sinister tones, with ethereal blue skies replaced by a gathering storm. Here, the boy’s arms are raised, and his right hand clutches a gun. Its form is deliberately ambiguous, so one can read it as either a toy or a lethal weapon. Still, it’s hard not to see Boy with Gun and not immediately think of the onslaught of gun violence that makes the United States an outlier of the developed world. 

Boy With Gun, 2021, by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

‘School shootings are for the most part a white male problem. If you look at the statistics, it’s white boys who are responsible for these shootings, which has to do with a feeling of entitlement,’ they say. They find it disturbing that boys are often expected to play with toy guns, rather than being taught to respect other people’s lives: ‘The mindset that results in violence begins to form really early in life. It’s why you should put in all the effort and resources you can to nurture the next generation in a different way.’

The artists’ commentary on the crisis of masculinity continues throughout the space, which also features three familiar characters: Bogdan, Kev and Flo from Short Story, an installation that was first shown at Berlin’s König Galerie. This time, Bogdan, a wheelchair-bound elderly man drifting off in slumber, is placed atop a black woollen rug designed by the artists. A Day Short of a Year, as it is titled, is covered with 364 white tally marks, perhaps pointing to Bogdan’s imminent demise or the end of an era. Kev and Flo are two boys on opposite ends of a tennis court, the younger Kev has evidently lost the match and lies exhausted on the floor, while the elder Flo clutches a trophy but appears despondent. Unlike in Berlin, where viewers could roam the tennis court freely, the court at ‘The Nervous System’ can only be viewed behind glass, forcing us into the same perspective as Boy with Gun and grounding our experience of the artwork in the current pandemic. 

We are reminded of the fact that we’re indoors, perhaps against our will. The effect is enhanced by furniture pieces within the show – some (such as a distinctively masculine ‘Ox’ chair and a long leather sofa, both by Hans J Wegner) carefully sourced to evoke the midcentury, others created by Elmgreen & Dragset. A second rug in the exhibition, evocatively titled Lost Memories, has seven circular holes that, despite their geometric precision, feel like bullet holes. An original travertine fireplace has elegant proportions, inspired by the artists’ visit to a public library in São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi. But it comes, disorientingly, with a TV antenna and is etched with the words ‘The oracles are gone and lost are the gods.’ (Adjacent is The Kiss, a new sculpture of two intersecting jerrycans).

The Ox and the Snake, by Elmgreen & Dragset, featuring a lacquered bronze python coiled on an 'Ox' chair by Hans J Wegner. Photography: Elmar Vestner

The artists have created a table lamp as well, featuring a porcelain base of two gently intersecting spheres, which taper into two necks supporting light bulbs and a lemniscate-shaped white cotton lampshade. They were inspired by a Qing dynasty vase that they encountered at Taipei’s Palace Museum years ago: ‘despite its age, it reminded us of Félix González-Torres’ Perfect Lovers’, they recall. Unusually for an artwork, it is available in four colourways (each an edition of three): mint green, dove blue, millennial pink and eggshell white. They point out that the colours in fact reference edible pigments that are used to coat HIV medicines such as Truvada and Isentress – behind their visual appeal lies a painful history that we must not forget.

Coupled Lamp (Mint Green), by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

This is a melancholic exhibition, a cautionary message in a city that, at least until the arrival of the Omicron variant, has been dizzy with optimism. As Elmgreen & Dragset explain, ‘the artist’s role is to go against short-term memory. This is one of the few tasks we have.’ In a world that seems swept away by promises of a brighter future post-pandemic, they wish to remind us that there are longstanding problems to be dealt with: among them the climate emergency, gun violence and toxic masculinity. We’d be wise to tackle them head-on, lest we find ourselves left with a pair of perforated wellies when the waters rise.

INFORMATION

‘The Nervous System’ runs until 18 December, Pace New York, 540 West 25th Street, pacegallery.com

‘MASSAGE: €35/60 min, €45/90min, sans rendez-vous’, reads the decal on a ground-level window on Paris’ Avenue Matignon, a stone’s throw from the Champs-Elysées. The choice of font – Brush Script for the headline, Comic Sans for the rest – and the suggestion of spontaneous, suspiciously cheap treatments is sure to turn heads. But don’t jump to the conclusion of a neighbourhood in decline. What appears to be a massage parlour is in fact a new show at Perrotin, ‘New Tenants’, by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset.

Through the window, we see a treatment room with a two-toned wall (white and mint green, reminiscent of the artists’ swimming pool installations), with a bamboo rack in the corner containing massage oils, towels and slippers. In the centre is a massage bench where a life-size silicone figure of a naked man lies prone, covered only by a white towel over his hips. This is hardly an aspirational visual: the massage bench is an off-the-shelf, collapsible model upholstered in off-white artificial leather, and the naked figure appears deliberately ordinary, with pallid skin, body hair in unflattering places, and not much visible musculature. 

The Touch, as the installation is ironically titled (the masseur is nowhere in sight), continues on Elmgreen & Dragset’s ongoing interest in how we interact with our surroundings. Masters of spatial transformation, they have converted Seoul’s Plateau gallery into a modernist airport terminal, Whitechapel Gallery’s ground-floor exhibition space into a derelict swimming pool, and the nave of Berlin’s St Agnes church (now owned by König Galerie) into an indoor tennis court. Similarly, The Touch subverts expectations and sparks our imaginations, with a dash of irreverence that makes it difficult to turn away.

‘When we come into a room, even if it is an amazing institution, we are constantly asking ourselves how we can transform it into something that changes its identity for a time,’ says Michael Elmgreen in a recent interview for Sculpture magazine. ‘Maybe that has to do with us not being brought up in a museum environment. We never take an art space for granted.’

The show continues in the adjacent room, where a selection of bodily-related sculptural works are on display: monochrome diving boards, displayed as a duo (Couple) and trio (Ménage à Trois), a Möbius-shaped swimming pool in polished stainless steel (Human Scale (Loop Pool)), and a mirrored surface that has been repeatedly ruptured by a lacquered bronze hand (Doubt, Fig. 3).

Also present is a pair of sinks, installed perpendicular to each other and linked with a twisting pipe – so that water poured down one sink would in theory re-emerge in another. Titled Separated, this 2021 work nods to the 2004 installation Marriage which showed two interconnected sinks side by side. The new iteration seems to suggest the way two people can remain intertwined after their relationship has collapsed, however hard they try to extricate themselves.

Outside the gallery is a brushed bronze and stainless steel sculpture from 2020, depicting a vulture perched on a barren tree. This predatory motif – which the artists previously employed at London’s Frieze Sculpture Park in 2018, and at their V&A show ‘Tomorrow’ in 2013 (it was also part of their cover portrait for the October 2013 Guest Editors issue of Wallpaper*) – is given an ambiguous spin with the title of the work, Hope. We like to think that hope springs eternal. But Elmgreen & Dragset’s new show points to the illusory nature of our post-pandemic optimism, and reminds us that the promise of release may turn out hollow, like the masseur who never arrives and the divorce that doesn’t quite materialise.

INFORMATION

Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘New Tenants’, until 20 November 2021, Perrotin Matignon 

perrotin.com

elmgreen-dragset.com 

ADDRESS

View Google Maps

2 bis avenue Matignon
Paris 8e

Bogdan sits in a corner of Elmgreen & Dragset’s latest solo exhibition, slouched in a wheelchair, hands clasped on his belly. He wears only grey trousers and black closed-toe sandals, leaving his fleshy, aging torso exposed and glistening from the spotlight above. Eyes shut, brow furrowed and lips lightly pursed, he looks like he’s drifting into sleep. In a possible allusion to his loneliness, the space around him is left bare.

Bogdan is one of three new, white-lacquered bronze sculptures that the artists have created for the nave of St Agnes, the Brutalist church turned exhibition space for Berlin’s König Galerie. He’s the only one visible from the stairway leading to the gallery, offering an entry point into the simple, yet enigmatic setting.

Across the room, on a raised platform, is a tennis court. Save for the slightly reduced dimensions (ten per cent smaller than an actual court, to account for spatial limitations), the court is as realistic as it gets, laid with the same orange rubber granulate often found in sports grounds, with all the usual markings and a bisecting net. On opposing ends of the court are sculptures of two boys, Kev and Flo, who seem to have just wrapped up a match.

Kev, dressed in t-shirt and oversized shorts, lies face down on the ground, his racquet out of reach, appearing exhausted and forlorn. Meanwhile, the slightly bigger Flo, who dons a posher tennis ensemble, stands facing a corner clutching a shiny trophy. Despite being the ostensible winner of the game, his head is lowered and his expression is despondent, the taste of victory evidently not as sweet as he expected. 

Aptly titled ‘Short Story’, the show opens up to multiple readings. At its heart is a parable about growing up: the younger boy representing the burden of expectation and craving for validation; his older counterpart realising that long-awaited achievements don’t always come with a sense of satisfaction. As a commentary on childhood, the new work is a natural successor to classic Elmgreen & Dragset installations such as their Fourth Plinth commission, featuring a boy astride his rocking horse; and Dilemma at Oslo’s Ekebergparken, showing another boy teetering at the edge of a diving board. The pairing of Kev and Flo also critiques a common practice of dividing the world between losers and winners, asking whether such a distinction is meaningful or emotionally fulfilling. ‘It’s not like the winner in this story comes out feeling any better than the one who has lost,’ explains Dragset.

What distinguishes ‘Short Story’ from the artists’ previous work is the choice of a tennis court as its setting. Elmgreen & Dragset are no strangers to sporting metaphors, having used the swimming pool at the 2009 Venice Biennale, at Rockefeller Center, and more recently at Whitechapel Gallery. But compared to swimming – which can be an unstructured endeavour – tennis is more rigidly defined, with a clear set of rules and visual guidelines that take the form of court markings. By incorporating a tennis court into their art, Elmgreen & Dragset draw attention to ‘how people often navigate spaces in ways that become so commonplace we barely notice them any longer.’ Like they have done in the ‘Highway Paintings’ series, which frames traffic markings on rectangular pieces of asphalt, the artists wish to highlight the hidden power mechanisms embedded into public spaces. 

‘I always thought it would be weird for people from the 18th century to experience our way of living,’ considers Elmgreen. ‘It must be terrifying for them to see how controlled we are. Even in our leisure, we engage in sports like tennis, where we invent rules and control mechanisms in order to have fun.’

The tennis court also comes with connotations of status. ‘In spite of the relatively low demand of equipment, the sport has often been associated with the upper-middle class of society,’ the artists point out. By situating the two boys in a class-specific setting, they seem to be alluding to another control mechanism that pervades modern society. ‘Where there is a winner and a loser, there is no team spirit or joint game building’ – their description of the game at hand could well be a metaphor for our fractured world. 

And then there’s the solitary Bogdan, whose relationship to the two boys is ambiguous. Perhaps he’s their grandfather? Or, seeing as the year 1969 is engraved on Flo’s trophy, could they be figments of his memory? To such guesses, Elmgreen & Dragset are not offering any answers. What is clear is that the inclusion of Bogdan raises similar questions about sculptural history as the Fourth Plinth commission once did. ‘Sculptures of kids and old people don’t appear very often. At least if they’re not emperors or kings, or otherwise important persons. We more often see young or middle-aged heroic male figures, like warriors or workers,’ notes Elmgreen. But who is to say that the inner life of an aging, wheelchair-bound man can’t be as compelling?

Video walkthrough of Elmgreen & Dragset, ’Short Story’ at König Galerie

INFORMATION
‘Short Story’, until 2 August 2020, König Galerie, Berlin. To maintain social distancing, visitors are required to pre-register online for a 30 minute viewing slot. koeniggalerie.com

ADDRESS

König Galerie
Alexandrinen Str 118-121
Berlin 10969

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

The swimming pool isn’t a new motif in the work of Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset. From a diving board sticking out of a window at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1997 to a silicone mannequin floating face down at the 2009 Venice Biennale or, more recently, a deserted public pool at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the artists’ fascination for all things aquatics has been a driving force across their multi-faceted, witty oeuvre.
 
This time, the subversive pair take to Miami Beach with an ambitious installation erected outside of the Convention Center, seasonal home to Art Basel Miami Beach. Titled Bent Pool, the 20ft tall curved swimming pool draws on minimalism’s geometric forms as much as on pop art and conceptualism’s use of readymade objects and imagery. But it also pays homage to the city’s architectural tradition, while providing a commentary on luxury in the age of climate change. ‘Swimming pools are woven into the very fabric of Miami Beach,’ Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset said of their site-specific work, ‘what they represent is actually something in danger of becoming frivolous, rather than remaining iconic.’

Indeed, it is no secret that, while extravagant condominiums continue to rise along its shores, Miami Beach is, in fact, drowning. In recent years, the growing threats associated with rising sea levels and stronger tropical storms have cast uncertainty over the coastal city’s scenic, pastel-tinted streets and art deco buildings, leading to rampant climate gentrification across the surrounding county. ‘You have this illustrious legacy of iconic hotels and swimming pool design, luxury and leisure, which is nowadays juxtaposed with this undeniable fragility that comes from the city’s very geography,’ said the Berlin-based duo, who are currently enjoying a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.
 
The sculpture, which mimics the frame of an otherwise oval swimming pool, bent in an inverted U-shape and standing upright on a two-tier plinth, is reminiscent of the monumental architecture of a triumphal arch. Such structure traditionally marks historical battles or the ceremonial entrance to a city – here, suitably greeting the art crowds as they march into Art Basel Miami Beach and neighbouring Design Miami, where they’ll put their bet on the next hot thing. But the artists explain that the piece ‘creates a more intimate and everyday kind of arch’, one which can only be crossed by one person at a time; perhaps a nod to the relentlessly fast-paced and speculative nature of the art market.

Officially inaugurated during Art Basel Miami Beach, Bent Pool is the final in a series of six site-specific public art works, permanently installed in and around the Miami Beach Convention Center. Other artworks launched earlier this year include a ceramic-tile installation by British artist Sarah Morris, a mural by German artist Franz Ackermann, outdoors garden sculptures by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout and hand-painted glass panels by British-American artist Ellen Harvey. They were selected by the City of Miami Beach’s Art in Public Places programme in concurrence with the $620m revamp of the 1950s Miami Beach Convention Center, completed last year by American firm Fentress Architects. Having cost $7m (the programme allocates 2 per cent of all capital costs for City projects), the series represents the largest public art project of its kind in American history installed on a single site – that is, while it’s still afloat.

INFORMATION

elmgreen-dragset.com; miamibeachfl.gov

ADDRESS

Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach

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From concept to completion, watch Elmgreen & Dragset and Georg Jensen bring ‘The Bed’ to life for Wallpaper* Handmade X. Videography: Mattia Abeni, courtesy of Georg Jensen

Georg Jensen’s HQ occupies a yellow-brick, former porcelain factory building in the leafy neighbourhood of Frederiksberg, Copenhagen. It’s a suitably impressive place, befitting a world-renowned heritage brand, but what sets it apart is what it contains, rather than its architecture. On its first floor is the world’s largest silver smithy, where the time-honoured craft of shaping hollowware by hand, and without the use of moulds, is still practised. There are up to 25 silversmiths working at a time, on an output of varying scale and design, from small spoons to magnificent tureens, and from the art nouveau creations of the brand’s eponymous founder to contemporary tea sets by Marc Newson (see W*200) and Kengo Kuma. Despite the clatter of hammers, the mood is calm and purposeful.

On a cold, blustery day in January, artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have flown over from Berlin to develop their Handmade project with Georg Jensen. Chief creative officer Nicholas Manville gives them a tour, showing them the 3D printers used for prototyping, introducing them to a craftsman who has been toiling over a Henning Koppel fish dish, then lingering on an egg-shaped bonbonnière from 1908, laden with amber and green agate. This is followed by a visit to the archive, a Wunderkammer crammed with historic pieces and original sketches.

Elmgreen & Dragset come from Denmark and Norway respectively, so they are longtime admirers of Georg Jensen. ‘We’ve seen first-hand how it is an important part of the design landscape,’ they say. They are the first artists to be working with Georg Jensen in recent memory, but artistic collaborations, starting with painter Johan Rohde in 1906, shaped the brand’s early years. An artist collaboration makes perfect sense, says Manville. ‘We have an artistic language that we use in-house when developing designs. So why not work with someone in the art world?’

The artists have brought along a 3D-printed model of their design for Handmade, which will be made in sterling silver and come to be known as ‘The Bed’. It can be thought of as a futuristic interpretation of that ovoid bonbonnière, divided into two halves and containing an upholstered interior in the artists’ signature cyan. Within the base are parallel slots to fit two iPhone X, which, when inserted, would look as though they’re in bed together. Reinforcing both function and metaphor, the interior structure would block both signal reception and sound.

‘The biggest threat to our love lives and relationships might be our use of cell phones,’ says Elmgreen, who recalls that one of his relationships had in fact ended because of his partner’s excessive phone use. ‘The Bed’, therefore, is a relationship therapist in object form, intended ‘to protect real-life intimacy, and protect lovers from the digital interference around them’.

The egg-like form, as the artists point out, comes with the promise of incubation and birth. But ‘The Bed’ also stands for a promise of a different sort – of a mutual commitment to human interaction. The two owners of the piece are meant to put their phones ‘in bed’ as they enter their home, ‘a symbol of each partner agreeing to fully enter the situation of being together’, says Dragset. ‘We live in a world of too many stimuli, so we need to de-invent,’ adds Elmgreen. ‘This is an old-school object, in an old-school material, to contradict the invention of the smartphone.’

Georg Jensen’s product developer Philip Mørch-Lassen, a silversmith with a background in computer animation, was tasked with turning Elmgreen & Dragset’s vision into reality. He runs through the technicalities with the artists – the sharpness of the indentations, the way the lid will close, the choice of fabric for the interior – before mapping out ‘The Bed’ on his computer to calculate the amount of silver required for the piece. Then it’s off to the smithy.

A project like this usually takes half a year to turn around, but with less than three months until the piece had to be exhibited in Milan, the making was entrusted to the finest of experts, Michael Birkefeldt, who has worked at Georg Jensen for two decades, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. His biggest challenge was ensuring a perfect union between base and lid. Once this was done, ‘The Bed’ was fitted with its high-density foam interior, which was lined with felt by a nearby upholsterer.

While Birkefeldt worked to create two ‘Beds’, so one could be shown open and the other closed, Elmgreen & Dragset drew up plans for the display, a half-egg-shaped white plinth with a strip of Black Belgian marble, and a matching reception desk, which would take over the foyer of our venue in Milan, nodding to the suggested positioning of ‘The Bed’ at the entrance to a home.

The finished ‘Beds’ were a hit in Milan, and judging from the fingerprints that kept appearing on the silver in spite of our best efforts to polish it, many visitors couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. ‘It was nice to see how people reacted,’ reflects Manville. ‘A craft that is over a hundred years old came to life in such a contemporary environment. This project has made Georg Jensen bolder about what we can contribute to the conversation between art and craft.’

In fact, both parties were so pleased with their Handmade adventure that they are producing a limited-edition series of five (in addition to the original, bound for Elmgreen & Dragset’s Berlin studio). Manville has plans to send the pieces on a world tour in Georg Jensen stores. So if you missed ‘The Bed’ in Milan, there will be plenty of opportunities to see it. Just resist the impulse to whip out your phone and broadcast that moment on social media – like love, this is an artwork best experienced in real time, in real life.

As originally featured in the August 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*245)

INFORMATION

elmgreen-dragset.com; georgjensen.com

Berlin-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have never staged an official mid-career retrospective – but that’s not because the opportunity hasn’t presented itself. Rather, every time such a show is supposed to be produced, the industrious former Wallpaper* Guest Editors devise a new concept or body of work.

This was most recently the case at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where they created an all-encompassing installation centred on an abandoned public pool. Sure, there were also works from the 1990s and early 2000s on view, but those came only after making one’s way through the dystopian setting. That being said, the new 158-page book Elmgreen & Dragset, published by Phaidon, might be the closest thing we ever get to a comprehensive survey of the duo’s work – for now, at least.

During the book’s launch at König Gallery in Berlin on 14 May, the artists admitted that – despite their international recognition – this is the first time they’ve worked with an equally established publishing house. The Scandinavian duo typically prefer to have complete oversight in all aspects of their printed matter, from the contributors to the layout to the paper quality – yet here, they have ceded some creative control to editor Michele Robecchi and followed the fixed format of Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series.

There is an interview with Linda Yablongksy, an essay on the artist’s overarching practice by Martin Herbert, a text focused on their early body of work Powerless Structures by Connie Butler, and a visual tour of their studio with images made by photographer Jason Schmidt. In addition to these external contributions, however, Elmgreen & Dragset also developed a small section of artists’ writings, for which they were given carte blanche. Scans from previous publications, such as those produced for their exhibition ‘Tomorrow’ at the V&A (2013–14), are intertwined with more intimate ephemera, like a personal snapshot from the photographic series The Incidental Self (2006) overlaid with a poem by Elmgreen.

While the bulk of the monograph reads like a traditional survey (one that in this case is much needed, as no other exists), it is here, in these eight pages, that the publication turns away from a standard art book format and returns to the idea of an artist’s book – one in which Elmgreen & Dragset once again show that they are never short on ideas, no matter the supposed confines or limitations of a project. 

INFORMATION

Elmgreen & Dragset, £35, published by Phaidon

Were it not for the gleaming beer taps, Elmgreen & Dragset’s ovoid Queer Bar/Powerless Structures, Fig. 221 (which won the title of Best Watering Hole in the 2019 Wallpaper* Design Awards) could have been a minimalist monument, its sterile Corian surfaces evoking a clinic rather than a seedy drinking den.

The humour, of course, lies in the piece’s inside-out configuration; the black stools are trapped in its core, which the viewer is unable to access. As in the Berlin-based artists’ earlier work – whether a diving board bisected by a window, a pair of pissoirs encased in glass, or a series of inoperable doors – the denial of function transforms an otherwise mundane item into a catalyst for contemplation.

Created for the artists’ 2018 solo show at Galerie Perrotin in Paris – two decades after its contrastingly square precursor, the original Queer Bar/Powerless Structures, Fig. 21 – the work speaks not so much to LGBT disenfranchisement but rather bygone pleasures. Specifically, it bemoans the fading ritual of meeting new friends or lovers at a bar, at a time when social media has all but driven in-person introductions into extinction.

As we revisit Elmgreen & Dragset’s Queer Bar in 2022, in honour of Pride Month – and in the hope that pandemic lockdowns and the enforced isolation that came with them are firmly behind us – we feel more ready than ever to celebrate spontaneous and IRL social interaction. So here’s to the artist duo, and to their perpetual raising of the bar. 

A version of this article originally featured in the February 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*239); subscribe today.

For more from Elmgreen & Dragset, see TF Chan’s interview with the artists on the occasion of the opening of their ongoing exhibition, ‘Useless Bodies?’, which can be seen at Fondazione Prada in Milan until 22 August 2022. 

INFORMATION

elmgreen-dragset.com

perrotin.com

Scandinavian art duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have become masters of the architectural installation over the past 13 years, picking up critical acclaim and international gallery shows as they go. Their work is characterised by presenting a familiar space in a different context. This has ranged from Prada Marfa, a fully stocked but sealed Prada store, left to decay in the deserts of Texas in 2005, to this October’s conversion of London’s Victoria Miro Gallery into a low-rent nightclub after closing time. So it’s no surprise their own 1,000 sq m studio-cum-apartment is a carefully considered space.

An imposing former pump house, it has a red-brick exterior, landing-strip windows and ramshackle grounds, and a somewhat abandoned feel to it when viewed from the quiet tree-lined street. It’s an unusual landmark in the slightly run-down Berlin suburb of Neukölln. Yet the shabby exterior belies a slick minimal interior. Largely designed by the artists, with practical input from the German practice Wenk und Wiese, the space combines a working studio with private rooms on the upper level. On first entering the building, the vastness of the 13m-high atrium, flooded with natural light from original windows, is breathtaking. Only two mezzanines – lined with Mac-laden workstations – break up the vertical giddiness; on wheels, they can move horizontally, via the old crane infrastructure of the water pump.

So vast is the space that the artists have been able to chalk an outline of the stage of London’s Old Vic theatre on the floor, to rehearse their show, Drama Queens, for which they’re choreographing performances by motorised replicas of iconic sculptures. They use much of the building as a ‘semi-public space’, where their assistants work and where they plan to hold exhibitions by other artists.

Upstairs, the kitchen doubles as a meeting room and communal eating space, with a long, heavy board table by Jean Nouvel. ‘This room is the centre point,’ says Elmgreen. ‘We share it with everyone.’ The duo keeps returning to the notions of public and private space. This harks back to the Powerles Structures tag attached to a series of works in which they investigated how institutional buildings control human action through architecture. Dragset jokes, ‘Talking of power, all the door handles are the same as those in the German chancellor’s offices. We chose them for their classical German look.’

Above the kitchen are the individual bedrooms for the two – both with en suites, as well as a still-in-progress guest bedroom. The two artists, who were boyfriends for ten years after meeting in 1994, also have apartments in the Mitte district of Berlin. Elmgreen lives in the studio pretty much full-time though, with Dragset staying over occasionally. In Elmgreen’s room is a glass cabinet full of collectible trainers, and by the bed a Hans Wegner ‘Ox’ chair takes pride of place next to a photo of the same chair, with a young man reading naked in it. ‘I wanted the chair and I wanted the boy. I asked for them to be in the exhibition, “Home Is the Place You Left” in Norway earlier this year, and the museum paid for it and his flights. This photo is a document of that. It’s great when art can provide!’

At the top of the building is a converted vaulted attic with a window so big it has to slide up in sections. ‘We had the idea of using all the window budget on just one big one. We had it especially commissioned and it’s supposed to be the largest domestic window in Germany,’ Dragset explains. Wegner makes a reappearance in this space too, in the form of a long leather couch once housed in Copenhagen airport’s business lounge. ‘He was a really dry designer, a no bullshit designer,’ Elmgreen says, adding, ‘we wanted to make upstairs a very non-professional environment to work in.’ Irreverent objects dot the space: a stuffed flamingo takes pride of place next to the fireplace; while a similarly stuffed otter sits upon an opposing platform.

‘The flamingo was a present from Michael to me after we split. It was a substitute,’ Dragset explains. After breaking up, having moved to Berlin together in 1997, they found the space and couldn’t be happier with it. ‘It addresses our personal needs, our needs for sharing, for work, for trying things out.’ §

As originally featured in the November 2008 issue of Wallpaper* (W*116)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Elmgreen & Dragset website

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been disrupting white cube architecture since the 1990s, but their recently unveiled installation at London’s Whitechapel Gallery may be one of their most sagacious transformations yet. The site-specific commission – a ghostly derelict swimming pool in the ground-floor gallery – is a timely monument to the fate of civic spaces in an era of austerity politics.

The art of the con lies in the materiality of the environment: the nostril-tickling perfume of chlorine, a teak changing room door that leads nowhere, the grime-covered municipal tiling, and the peeling mint-green paint that evokes an uncanny sense of nostalgia and queasiness. More fascinating still, is the elaborate narrative that Elmgreen & Dragset have constructed for their audience.

Established in 1901 through social reform, the pool was renovated in the 1950s and used daily by local Aldgate residents until it fell into disrepair during Thatcherism. A plaque by the installation proclaims this is also the site where David Hockney made his first drawings of a swimming pool’s surface (Whitechapel Gallery in fact hosted the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in 1970).

The Whitechapel Pool, 2018, by Elmgreen & Dragset.

Naturally, the pool is destined to become the showpiece of a luxury hotel spa after being bought by a developer in 2016 (notably Boris Johnson’s final year as Mayor of London) – a fabricated outcome that convincingly aligns itself with the ‘intense gentrification’ of East London. Where fact ends and fiction begins has been an ongoing preoccupation of the former Wallpaper* Guest Editors (see W*175), who notoriously once wrapped the V&A in development hoardings and ‘for sale’ signs, shocking unsuspecting visitors to the museum.

The Whitechapel Pool is the focal point of the Scandinavian artist duo’s first survey in the UK – ‘This Is How We Bite Our Tongue’ – which also spans two decades of sculpture. A fallen classical figure of a man, described as an ‘anti-heroic sculpture’ by the artists, is a prelude to the figurative works in the upstairs galleries, exploring notions around masculinity, childhood, capitalism, religion and social class.

They’re sobering themes but Elmgreen & Dragset prove their sense of wit is as honed as ever. Portraits of the Artists (2018) – an empty wall with the faint trace of two portraits that previously hung there – echoes a 1998 sculpture of a couple of pairs of Levi’s jeans and Calvin Klein underpants left crumpled on the floor in a previous gallery. Like with The Whitechapel Pool, we’re left to ruminate on an imagined history of what could have taken place.

INFORMATION

‘This Is How We Bite Our Tongue’ is on view until 13 January 2019. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

The political events that have rocked Turkey have scared many visitors away in the last year, but slowly, they are returning, and with the 15th Istanbul Biennial and Contemporary Istanbul, and the unveiling of a new arts development, Juma Karakoy, in the capital this week, art is rebuilding confidence. The Biennial, running since 1987, and Contemporary Istanbul, started 12 years ago, have both played a significant part in establishing Turkey as a global destination, opening up the city’s contemporary culture in various ways.

‘We wanted to build the biennale like a neighbourhood,’ said the curators of the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Elmgreen & Dragset – the Scandinavian duo (and former Wallpaper* Guest Editors) known for putting a Prada store in the middle of the Texan desert. They invited 56 artists from 32 countries— including 10 Turkish artists – to participate in their theme for 2017, ‘a good neighbour’. At a press conference, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset were clearly irritated by media sensationalism: ‘It’s very sad to read in the international press that the Istanbul scene is closing, there are so many new artist-run spaces and small institutions opening.’

The six chosen venues for the biennial reflect different aspects of life in the city: the historic Kucuk Mustafa Pasa Hammam, (where the usual male/female spaces have been reversed, two women artists exhibiting in the larger male area, and one male artist in the female), two schools an artist workshop, and a former Bauhaus family home are among them. As a consequence, many of the artists have responded to the purpose of the buildings and their architectural features.

At Istanbul Modern, currently under construction, artists Latifa Echakchch’s installation, adjacent to Yonamine’s collages, both cull materials from the streets and destroy them to make their works, reflecting on the idea of creation and deconstruction in an urban environment. At the Pera Museum, meanwhile dedicated to Orientalist art and artefacts of the Ottoman Empire, American artist Fred Wilson has traced the roles of black Africans in Ottoman handcrafts, in an installation Afro Kismet. The works—and the spaces they highlight by inhabiting them—reflects Istanbul’s 8,000 year history as a cultural melting pot, and a city that is capable of constantly redefining itself. Even in the current wave of increased conservatism, the city’s architecture tells a story of co-existence, from the minarets of the mosques that prick the skyline to Byzantine fountains and glittering 13th century mosaics.

Contemporary Istanbul has supported Turkey’s gallery scene, as the country’s only contemporary art fair, since its art market took off in the early 2000s. The fair has encouraged 20 new international galleries to come to the city after a difficult 2016, when 40 international galleries pulled out. Among 40 returning galleries there is a major representation of Istanbul’s own, such as Dirimart, Galerist, Mixer, Gallery Nev, and Gaia Gallery. Political events have undoubtedly affected the Turkish economy and impacted in turn on its art market, but as CI Chairman Ali XX explains, ‘We are not for yesterday, nor today – but for tomorrow. Just as cities shape art, art shapes cities.’

Among the solo booths of international artists at Contemporary Istanbul is Gerald Chukwuma, presented by Gallery 1957, who travelled from Accra to Istanbul, for the first time, while Victoria Miro, Flowers and Bejing’s Galleria Continua are also participating for the first time. Sending a strong message of confidence, CI have also organised their first outdoor exhibition this year: a public sculpture garden in Sanatçılar Park that includes works by Tony Cragg, Jannis Kounellis, Wim Delvoye and Jan Fabre.

The united front among galleries, both local and international, in Istanbul, is a powerful statement after one of the most difficult periods in Istanbul’s recent history.  As the Istanbul Biennial curators see it, ‘the art community can give problems a human face and a different kind of perspective.’

INFORMATION

The 15th Istanbul Biennial runs from 16 September – 12 November. Contemporary Istanbul runs from 14 – 17 September. For more information, visit the Istanbul Biennial website and Contemporary Istanbul website

This month marks Wallpaper’s coming of age: our 21st anniversary. It’s also my tenth year as editor-in-chief, having switched from being creative director in April 2007. I must confess that my coming of age came a number of years earlier. Time flies.

One of the earliest projects I worked on in my new role was our inaugural October Guest Editors’ Issue. Now, many media outlets have given over their editorial reins to appropriate talents in order to bring a fresh perspective and generate some PR buzz. But because of Wallpaper’s multi-faceted editorial remit, we felt our spin on the concept should be equally all-encompassing – we would invite not just one, but up to three diverse creatives each year who would reflect our offering, but also push us to try new things.

So year one saw a purist industrial designer, Dieter Rams, an iconoclastic artist, Jeff Koons, and a much-more-than-a-fashion-designer fashion designer, Hedi Slimane. To rebalance the unintentional male bias for 2007, the next year saw Louise Bourgeois, Zaha Hadid and Rei Kawakubo bring art, architecture, and fashion girl power to our pages. Subsequent editions have seen Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, David Lynch, Robert Wilson, Kraftwerk, Christian Marclay, Lang Lang, Ole Scheeren, Taryn Simon, Laurie Simmons, Elmgreen & Dragset, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, William Wegman and Liz Diller have fun at our expense. That makes 21 in total, and therefore a convenient excuse to take a retrospective look, as well as request some updates for our latest issue. (Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm)

In addition to a 20-plus page section within the magazine, each of our Guest Editors was also invited to design a cover. Many called for unusual paper technologies – Hedi used specialist printing inks to simulate glitter, whereas Karl invited readers to strip the Dior Homme suit off his muse by means of a peelable layer. Starck constructed a transparent front cover using three layers of tracing paper. And Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter tacked on a pair of 3D specs, to go with his 3D cover portrait and portfolio of exclusive images tied to key Kraftwerk compositions.

If I had to pick one favourite project it would be Zaha’s. Her cover was a gatefold construction using multiple die-cuts, while inside she produced a 16-page die-cut sculpture, which was a take on her ‘Lotus’ room installation at that year’s Venice Biennale. ‘I want to put a big hole in the magazine’, she told us. We dutifully obliged.

Zaha was profiled by art critic Matthew Collings, who visited her at her London offices and provided a pleasant distraction from discussions about cement. Collings and ‘Big Z’, as he affectionately called her, hit it off immediately. ‘Her architecture is the greatest art of the moment,’ he said.

So it’s a huge pleasure for me and I think a fitting tribute to Zaha (who tragically passed away 18 months ago) that this anniversary issue’s cover was created by Zaha Hadid Architects and its principal and torchbearer, Patrik Schumacher.

Enjoy this special issue and raise a glass to Big Z.

Tony Chambers, Editor-in-Chief

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm, in keeping with our celebration of 21 years, and 21 guest editors

INFORMATION

The October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

Rarely before have we seen such a long and varied list of contributors, as we do in Marian Goodman Gallery's group show 'Animality'. The 'cast of creatures' ranges from dogs, camels, fish to octopi, and charts a history from George Orwell to Gabriel Orozco by way of Marcel Broodthaers. Curator Jens Hoffmann, never one to turn down a challenge, has outdone himself with this wild, two-floor adventure.

Subtitled 'A Fairytale by Jens Hoffmann', the exhibition transforms Marian Goodman's bright white space into a colourful – and noisy – zoo. The packed press preview certainly helped with the latter. Culture vultures circled and swooped to their hearts content. Though it must be said, the space feels less like a caged, organised zoo, and more like jungle – where weird and wonderful creatures roam free, decontexualised, to brilliant effect.

Carsten Höller's Octopus (above) almost obstructs the doorway to the darkened room in featuring Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva's video installation. Across the floor, a slug is famously oggled by a small boy in Elmgreen & Dragset's Dawn, Fig. 2 (2016). Above the staircase, Yinka Shonibare's tight-rope walking Calf Boy balances precariously overhead.

It sounds chaotic, but thanks to Hoffmann's sensitivity and coherent vision, it somehow ties together without trouble. The curator left his post as deputy director at New York's Jewish Museum in March with the intention of working with exhibitions in a more hands-on way. Here, he seems to let loose his pent-up creativity. 'Jens is not afraid to think big and has no shortage of creative ideas,' explains Courtney Plummer, director of Marian Goodman Gallery. 'He is very conscientious about contextualising the work and making sure there are layers of content and perspectives from which to consider.'

Upstairs, John Baldessari's imposing albino camel (above) deservedly takes centre stage. It remains humorously surprising, no matter how many times you've seen it in the white-bone flesh. Abraham Cruzvillegas' glossy ink and acrylic paintings, created earlier this year, are another marked highlight. Touching upon Hoffmann's more serious theme of animals edging into extinction, Cruzvillegas paints a series of silverback gorillas, each ever more gently than the last, fading into obscurity, so the final portrait is difficult to make out.

Plummer tells us that this exhibition has taken about a year to pull together. It's not surprising – with over 70 works to peruse 'Animality' is an overwhelming feat, aided by the range of artistic mediums on display (photography, film, sculpture, historical artefact, painting, installation). This adds to the sheer, confusing joy of it. With rules being continuously rewritten in the human political realm of late, it seems apt that Hoffman rewrites the rules of the animal kingdom too, where peacocks perform happily aside keen-eyed tigers, and octopi line the floors, ready to trip ill-prepared humans up.

INFORMATION
’Animality’ is on view until 17 December. For more information, visit the Marian Goodman Gallery website

ADDRESS

Marian Goodman Gallery
5-8 Lower John St
London W1F 9DY

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Elmgreen & Dragset's latest artwork, Van Gogh's Ear, is an upright, 9m-high swimming pool in the shape of an ear, intriguingly placed outside the Rockefeller Centre in New York.

Compared to the Scandinavian-born, Berlin-based artists' previous work, the piece is fundamentally new in spirit; a direct continuation in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, which place daily objects as high art into museum (or in this case, public) spaces, without the artist's physical intervention.

But Van Gogh's Ear also echoes the duo's previous work, feeling as plonked in an outré setting as Prada Marfa, their fake Prada store in the West Texas desert. Indeed, Elmgreen & Dragset compared their piece to 'an alien spaceship' that had landed in the midst of New York's 'prominent and busy environment’, a location that is ‘visually so loud’. 

‘This part of New York is all about verticality. Horizontal would just not work here,’ the duo explain. 'One can dream of lazy days under the sun while surrounded by all the traffic and business going on at Rockefeller Plaza.' To some New Yorkers, this invitation to daydream about California may be freeing – to others, it may feel sadistic.

The installation also continues the artists' fetish for swimming pools, objects they lacked growing up in Denmark and Norway. ‘We see the swimming pool as sort of the idealised middle class dream from high modernism,’ they explain, ‘one that is now rendered defunct.’ Their Death of a Collector installation, presented at the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, involved a dead body floating face down in a pool. They took inspiration from David Hockney’s paintings and Ed Ruscha’s photos of swimming pools.

Nicholas Baume of the Public Art Fund, which hosts the installation, says, 'For many years, Elmgreen & Dragset have been masters of the unforgettably uncanny object. With its dramatic scale, wildly incongruous setting, and cleverly macabre title, Van Gogh’s Ear promises to be perhaps their wittiest installation yet.' 

In its playfulness, the installation will temporarily change the spirit of 5th Avenue, perhaps lightening it up, and it will definitely go down in history as a different way of remembering the myths about Van Gogh's lost appendage.

INFORMATION

’Van Gogh’s Ear’ is on view until 3 June. For more information, visit the Rockefeller Center website

Images courtesy the artists and the K11 Art Foundation, Galerie Perrotin, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, and Victoria Miro Gallery

ADDRESS

5th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets
New York, NY 10111

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The London-and-Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset will be opening their first show ever in Israel on 31 March, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition comprises the third part of a trilogy – previous chapters took place at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo and the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.

This site-specific exhibition, entitled 'Powerless Structures', questions political, financial, cultural and even physical social frameworks. In the opinion of Ruti Direktor – head curator for contemporary art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art – these questions are viewed through an utterly unique lens.

'In Elmgreen & Dragset's work, the biographical element is at once explicit and implicit, and it is almost always tied, in various ways, to their relationship and their dual identity as artists,' says Direktor in the passage she wrote about the artists in the book Elmgreen & Dragset – Biography, accompanying the Oslo show.

'Thus, for instance, in their short play, Happy Days in the Art World, the protagonists are two artists working together, concerned about what will happen to their creative future if they break up.' But even just the idea of biography is something the artists turn upside down by signing their works with their two names.

The works on display at the exhibition span the years 2006 to 2016 and include pieces like For as Long as it Lasts, 2016, a full size replica of a section of the Berlin Wall mounted in dialogue with another work, The Future, 2014, an installation of a hooded teen sitting on a fire escape. Of course, typical of the duo are cheekier works like Donation Box, 2006, a transparent box filled with personal items that, instead of being open for donations, it is sealed off. Of course, it's just another knowing wink from the artists.

INFORMATION

’Powerless Structures’ runs from 31 March – 27 August. For more information, visit the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s website

ADDRESS

Tel Aviv Museum of Art
27 Shaul Hamelech Blvd
POB 33288, Tel Aviv

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The Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset have always been fascinated with the sophisticated sausage-making machinery of the art world; the complex systems that assign cultural credit and commercial value, the chain of white cubes that add heat and sizzle. Nothing exemplifies the absurdity of that system better then the contemporary art fair; the banal ranked cubes of art, seemingly random objects in dead space; the baroque, burnished collectors; and the feudal hierarchy of access.

For their first exhibition in mainland China, the pair have created their own take on the art fair at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. 'The Well Fair' smartly smuggles in and spins an 80-piece selective career retrospective with art fair-style booths and common areas displaying 20 year’s worth of E&D output. Of course, that’s not all there is to it.

Some pieces remain in crates or half-installed, leaning nonchalantly against walls. In one booth, two house painters repeatedly paint white already white walls, a recreation of the piece Zwischen anderen Ereignissen, first performed in 2000. In another two booths, the art pieces and furniture are exactly replicated. Even the gallerists, ‘played’ by identical twins, are mirror images and make identical moves, yawns and laptop tappings. Last year’s Secondary also doubles up, re-creating an auction room but mirrored from the middle and accompanied by the cacophony of auctioneers in action.

Adding to the general meta-ness are collected works such as The Named Series, 2012, carefully sliced and framed sections of white wall from the Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou and other grand art institutions; and last year’s Self Portraits, re-sized or re-materialised wall labels that name check works that have somehow inspired or affected the artists. A bar is inverted, with chairs trapped and tempting taps facing the wrong way and, perhaps most pleasingly of all, the VIP lounge is inaccessible to all.

As ever, Elmgreen & Dragset like to show their workings out and to open up conversations. The show’s catalogue includes pieces by Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover as well as art critics, cultural psychologists and marketing specialists; an interview with the artists; and a WhatsApp conversation between Art Basel directors Marc Spiegler, Noah Horowitz and Adeline Ooi.

INFORMATION

’The Well Fair’ is on view until 17 April. For more information, visit the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art’s website

ADDRESS

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
798 Art District
No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu
Chaoyang District,
Beijing 100015

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The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are best known for grand-scale immersive installations tackling big issues. In End Station they built a fake New York subway station, an entire social housing block for Celebrity – The One and Many, the homes of an art collector and an architect in serious decline, and perhaps most famously, a fake Prada store in the Texas desert. The sublime is not their concern. Neither, on the whole, do they do minimal or personal. ‘Self-Portraits’, the duo’s new show at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair branch, is both. And it’s ever so simple. 

Essentially, the pair track a life – two lives – in art through sometimes blown up, sometimes not, museum wall labels. Revelatory moments, career-changing or emotional insights, identify-forming identifications and psychic blows – we suppose, but can only suppose – are here.

Works by David Hockney, Ross Bleckner, Roni Horn, Martin Kippenberger, Keith Haring and Nicole Eisenman are namechecked. (Ingar told us once that he had visited the Rothko chapel in search of the sublime, of the transcendental, the transfigurative even, as many artists and other do, and came away unmoved. So there is no namecheck for him.)

There are no reproductions of the actual art here. Instead the labels take on the shape and form and material quality of art; they are made in marble, they are paint on canvas and metal, charcoal on paper. The pair are famously sceptical about the traditional gallery space as a place to experience art; the ways it gives an authority and reverence indiscriminately (though you must presume discrimination somewhere).

They like their art to work harder, to command and create interest outside the temple. Or to create a total space within the temple. ‘Self-Portraits’, then, is perhaps another sly dig at the system; the explanatory tag becomes the art because we only know anything as ‘art’ because the tag tells us it is. The tag marks out art, the tag becomes art. (In the past, they have spent 12 hours painting a White Cube gallery space even whiter. In another exhibition, they mounted the actual recovered wall surface of various museums on canvas. ‘Self-Portraits’ can be seen as part of a continuing series.)

'Self-Portraits',' they explain, 'is reminiscent of our early projects in which we analysed the very format and process of exhibiting by using the seemingly insignificant components common in museum or gallery displays. We’ve turned these into something that suddenly gains a different meaning, that becomes the main focus – in this case, the small wall label, which is normally just there to inform you about the corresponding work.'

But there is more here than that. The pair are also curiously, pleasingly old-fashioned in their predilection for narrative – and this is, in part, their story. This is a self-portrait. It also questions how much our identity is built from these markers.

'The exhibition shows what we, Ingar and Michael, share,' says the duo. 'In a rather unfiltered way, it tells about our inspirational sources. The titles on these label paintings and engraved marble reliefs all refer to events and situations in our own personal lives, or to important dialogues between us, since our collaboration is based on our dialogues.'

It might also be a glorious celebration of art. It might suggest that you can better, truly understand someone if you know what has moved them, what meant something at a particular time. And even more than that, that we are bent into shape by those moments. It might. It is always hard to tell.  

INFORMATION

'Self-Portraits' is on view until 7 November

Courtesy the artists and Victoria Miro, London

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London, W1S 1FE

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The Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art in central Seoul has been transformed into an airport by Elmgreen & Dragset, the Danish-Norwegian artist duo renowned for their trademark philosophical take on modern societal controls.

The exhibition – titled Aéroport Mille Plateaux – is notable for its meticulously recreated 1960s modernist interiors, sporting mind-teasing twists like a broken staircase leading to an unreachable Gate 23 and an abandoned baby. A selection of the works from the pair's previous exhibitions is also included.

With a title derived from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, visitors pass though the usual security checks – here unmanned – with a replica boarding pass (the admission ticket), while the museum shop has been transformed into a duty free vendor featuring quirky items such as Mille Plateaux eau de parfum. Wallpaper* caught up with the maverick couple to ask about their take on art and that abandoned baby.

Wallpaper*: Tell us about the inspiration behind the concept of the exhibition.
Elmgreen & Dragset: When we first visited the venue in Seoul, we both thought that the architecture reminded us somehow of a micro-scaled airport. The curved, giant glass panes, the steel columns, the entrance and the stone flooring. We started to think about the definition of transitional spaces and the similarities between airports and other public institutions, like museums.

What are you trying to achieve with the show?
There is no specific storyline or intended message at play, but there is a general feeling of abandonment and loneliness that usurps the experience. Wherever you might feel like interacting, you find some sort of denial – a closed door or a malfunction. Still, everything looks deceptively normal. To us, this is pretty much an image of the world at large.

Why the baby left in front of a cash machine?
There are changes occurring in the demographics of most of the developed world today, particularly in regions like Korea and Japan. People consider a professional career more important than having children, and the result is a dramatic decrease in birth rates. The title of this work is Modern Moses (laughs). A forgotten baby.

Would you ever make an artwork simply for its intrinsic beauty?
Intrinsic beauty bores us. That doesn't mean that a work of art has to be 'ugly' if it implies a social message. It is important for us that the aesthetics and the message in a work come together in a way where they feed off each other, or contradict each other in a thrilling way. But art doesn't have to fulfil any special purpose, we think.

ADDRESS

Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art
55 Sejong-daero
Jung-gu
Seoul, Korea 100-716

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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.'

ADDRESS

909 Madison Avenue & 73rd Street
Upper East Side
New York
NY 10021

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The question that most visitors will ask of 'Biography', the retrospective of Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset at the National Gallery of Denmark, is: 'Whose biography?' To which, the one-time Wallpaper* guest editors Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset respond: 'It's yours.'

That is to say, the characters that Elmgreen and Dragset have planted within their dystopian interiors - an innocent-but-damned baby, a forlorn teen in a hoodie, a body drowned in a concrete swimming pool - are alter egos for all of us. 'Every figure has a little of us in him,' says Elmgreen, 'our worries, our phobias, our desires. We invent them in order not to become them.' Yet the burning question really should be, 'What kind of a life is it anyway?'

From the moment you mount the classical white staircase of the museum, near the botanical gardens in central Copenhagen, you're faced with a 'sad, grey, concrete' façade, the duo's mock-up of a social housing block, with peek-a-boo windows into cramped, charmless rooms. You see one resident watching X-Factor on a loop, another collapsed on the sofa while his computer displays messages from a gay chatroom. There are rooms furnished entirely with IKEA products, and a dog-eared manual for quitting smoking.

This is a community of people with no community, excluded from society, living vicariously through celebrities and social networks. And who can blame them, ask the artists. 'We're showing how people survive, how they escape reality by watching talent shows or singing karaoke,' they say. 'This is what makes life bearable in such a place.'

If there is a common thread running through the exhibition, dating back some 20 years to their rawest expressions of futility, it's exclusion. The most common motif is the roadblock: the sealed door, the crumbling staircase, the empty waiting rooms with nobody to call your number. They are no different in theory from the human figures, who look away blankly, excluding the viewer while being excluded themselves. 

In part it's a reaction against contemporary art, much of it buffed to a shine and saturated with colour. 'Loneliness and solitude are not often depicted nowadays,' says Elmgreen. 'There's too much culture today that tries to please its audience. But the exclusion of this sadness from artwork functions like denial.'

Of course, ugliness can be beautiful too. Elmgreen and Dragset credit as their inspiration European interiors depicted by Dutch Masters and the Danish Golden Age. They're determined to elevate interiors from the poor relations of architecture. 'We almost think of our scenery as a new version of interior painting,' says Elmgreen, 'like artists painting interiors throughout centuries that implied psychology and social codes.'

'Welcome', one of two new works in the show, is likewise a gorgeous illustration of hopelessness; physical darkness envelopes tropes of hardship like an Airstream trailer, fire escape and porcelain Rottweiler behind a chain-link fence. Slumped over the trailer is the felled 'Welcome to Las Vegas' beacon, setting up the binary reality of Sin City.

So far, so depressing. Yet the artists would sooner think of the viewing experience as cathartic, like the writing of Philipp Meyer or the films of Michael Haneke. 'Even if something's sad, it can put you in a good mood,' says Elmgreen. 'There's comfort in watching other people's misery.'

To coincide with the opening of the exhibition, the pair has also released a photographic diary of their lives leading up to the exhibition. Also called Biography, it is published by Hatje Cantz and available internationally at select bookstores.

ADDRESS

National Gallery of Denmark
Sølvgade 48-50
DK-1307 København K
Denmark

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In our October issue we welcomed Nordic art duo (and long-time friends of Wallpaper*) Elmgreen & Dragset as guest editors. They in turn welcomed us inside the grand but more-than-slightly melancholic South Kensington home of architect Norman Swann. Writing in the issue, Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, called Swann's influence 'one of the important, hidden currents of contemporary British architecture' and Wallpaper* editor-in-chief, while acknowledging his previous ignorance of Swann's career, calls him an 'outstanding architect, philosopher, writer, teacher and social commentator'. But now it's time to come clean. 

As some of you may have worked out, dear old neglected Norman Swann is no more real than his crumbly South Kensington pile (and many thanks to Long for his elegant trickery). Our peek through Swann's keyhole was actually a preview of 'Tomorrow', Elmgreen & Dragset's new show at the V&A, opening today, a conjuring up of the fictional Swann's home in what were disused textile galleries. 

The pair have picked 100 pieces from the V&A's collection, augmented with their own works and finds from antique markets, to create the Swann residence. Visitors to the show are invited to root around his rooms, rifle through his library, and even lie in his bed and put together their own take on Swann's way, conduct their own search for lost time (though the pair have also provided a script for an unmade film to fill in some of the gaps).

'Tomorrow' is the latest, and perhaps the most disquieting and affecting, of Elmgreen & Dragset's set pieces. And it was a pleasure to be in on the act.

Louis Vuitton has called on artists and friends of Wallpaper* Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset to bring something smartly - and unsettlingly - playful to the first floor exhibition space of their New Bond Street Maison.

The exhibition of new works by Elmgreen & Dragset includes 'Omnes Una Manet Nox' (One Night Awaits us All), an oversized ornate bed with a golden vulture perched on one of the bed posts, ready to dive in, we suppose, if the occupant slips into the big sleep; a rocking horse for grown up riders; a wall safe wired with sticks of dynamite, apparently taken from Wile E Coyote's arsenal; and a nest containing a golden egg.

The London and Berlin-based Scandinavians have also come up with a reading list for the curated shelf at the Louis Vuitton Librairie. And during the exhibition, store employees, tucked up in the centrepiece bed, will be read bedtime stories by actors and writers.

A small-scale version of 'Powerless Structures Fig.101', the sculpture the artists produced for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth - sponsored by Louis Vuitton and in place until next summer - has also been installed in the lobby of the store.

Louis Vuitton have an on-going relationship with the duo and they were involved in this summer's Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project Summer Academy, running workshops and taking part in outside trips. The young academicians took Elmgreen & Dragset's Fourth Plinth sculpture as the inspiration for four of their own pieces of public art, exhibited at different sites around London.

The Maison display runs concurrently with a show at the Victoria Miro gallery. 'Harvest' includes a series of what look like white paintings but is revealed to be sections of wall (actual and skilfully peeled off paint) from some of the world's best know white galleries, including New York's Guggenheim and London's Hayward.

Meanwhile, they have again come over all darkly fantastic on the upper floor, turning it into a barn complete with hay on the floor, rustic signifiers and another vulture. And, part of what feels like a national blitz, a newly commissioned work 'But I'm on the Guest List Too! 2012' is on show at the Liverpool Biennial 2012 until 25 November.

The weather was kind yesterday in Trafalgar Square as a new artwork by Danish artists (and long-term Wallpaper* collaborators) Elmgreen & Dragset was unveiled on the Fourth Plinth. The 4m-high bronze boy on a rocking horse is a witty and deliberate contrast to the statue of King George IV on the opposite plinth.

’I think we were chosen because so much of our work involves the use of space, and Trafalgar Square is such an important place in London,’ says Ingar Dragset. He and Michael Elmgreen work in the capital but are based in Berlin (their home-cum-studio featured in W*116). The piece, officially named ’Powerless Structures, Fig. 101’, ’is not about victory and defeat but expectation and change,’ Dragset adds.  

Elmgreen & Dragset - who we recently teamed up with for our September fashion story - are no strangers to monarchy-inspired monuments. Elmgreen hails from Denmark, which has its share of regal pomp and ceremony. ’Of course, we are bringing some humour, but we also wanted to bring a human, non-powerful element to the square,’ they say.

The artists also refer to the history of the plinth, which was built in 1841 for an equestrian statue of King William IV, which was never installed. Now, 170 years later, the plinth gets its monument, albeit one of an innocent anti-hero.

More than any other public artwork in London, The Fourth Plinth - set up as an art project in 1998, and supported by Louis Vuitton and Alixpartners - provokes heated discussions and transforms every Londoner into an art critic. ’Golden Boy,’ as the statue has been dubbed, is sure to have its fans and detractors. Ironically (or perhaps deliberately, in this Olympic year), it is supposed to show that there is more to life than winning, and that the simple things in life must also be celebrated.  

For Elmgreen & Dragset, having Joanna Lumley at the unveiling of their sculpture was a highlight. ’She absolutely lights up a room,’ says Elmgreen. The duo met her through Drama Queens, a play they wrote and performed at the Old Vic in 2008.

The Golden Boy follows Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture of Nelson’s Ship in A bottle, and will be replaced next year by German artist Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture of a giant blue cockerel.