Featuring five recent and new works as well as an offsite outdoor sculptural installation, viewers of this presentation are invited to create their own narratives, responding to implied actions and emotions suggested in the selection of works, where traces of presence and absence are finely balanced and where gestures both bold and intimate are interwoven.
Among the most renowned and widely exhibited artists in Europe, Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) challenge and readdress how art is presented and experienced with an often playful and subversive approach. The artist duo pursues complex questions of identity, sexuality, and belonging in their work. Often radically re-contextualizing everyday objects or transforming exhibition spaces into unexpected new environments, Elmgreen & Dragset draw on both lived experience and the context in which their works are shown. 2020 marks the 25th year of their collaboration, which has continued to call into question established power structures in society and deal with fundamental, existential questions.
On view in the exhibition is Couple, Fig. 19 (2019), part of an ongoing series of paired diving boards, which exemplifies this play with perception—shifting the role of the object by removing it from its functional setting and calling into question the significance of environment. The materiality of the work also defies the immediate reading of it as readymades, as each element is crafted by hand. Since their first diving board sculpture in 1997, the motif of a swimming pool has frequently appeared in their work. One key example was their 2016 installation Van Gogh’s Ear at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center in New York, which featured a large ear-shaped pool structure with an iconic, cyan-blue interior, lights, a diving board, and a stainless-steel ladder. Similarly, the duo’s Bent Pool (2019)—the 20-foot-tall installation in Pride Park outside the Miami Beach Convention Center—takes the form of an oval pool, bent upright into an inverted U-shape.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Black Socks (2019) subverts traditional notions of objectification and desire. The visual appearance of this sculpture responds to Peter Hujar’s black and white photograph Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs) (1976) in both form and color. The position of the crossed legs of the sculpture is drawn directly from the subject in Hujar’s iconic work, and the colors of the sculpture mimic the black-and-white tonality of the photographer’s image. Just as queer experiences play a profound role in the work of Elmgreen & Dragset, Hujar’s work frequently and powerfully captured queer life in New York City.
As part of the presentation Pace will also show Short Story (2020), a new outdoor installation situated on a tennis court incorporating two figurative bronze sculptures of young boys following the conclusion of a tennis match—one victorious, the other defeated. The expressions of the figures invite viewers to call into question the idea of competition and its reverberations in society, and more broadly the nuanced notion of situational fairness and outcomes. This installation will be available for viewing by appointment only.
