Galleries in Paris » Elmgreen & Dragset

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET PERROTIN

Galleries — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:28:15 +0000

After 20 years of collaboration with the gallery, the artists duo Elmgreen & Dragset unveils a new solo exhibition gathering seven sculptures or sculpted groups that depict several potential scenarios. This new project marks the tenth exhibition with the gallery.

Without transition, your eyes glued to the smartphone, you’ve entered the gallery space. You probably didn’t realize it. Your mind was elsewhere, lost in the limbo of an alternate reality, both physical and virtual. This is normal in today’s world, where reality is often filtered through devices, changing the experience of art itself. Interactivity has replaced contemplation, sharing content has replaced absorption. People show themselves experiencing art, whether with an #artselfie or a challenge for #arttok. More profoundly, our access to the real itself has been transformed. The experience is rarely direct, mediated by images, sounds, and texts shared with a swipe of our thumbs. You and I are the Thumbelina1 generation, participating in an all-encom- passing collective choreography.

Elmgreen & Dragset PERROTIN

Galleries — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 16:29:13 +0000

Perrotin Paris is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Elmgreen & Dragset, their first solo show in the city since the duo mounted a one-day installation at the Grand Palais in the fall of 2016. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked together for more than twenty years, in a wide range of media. They create sculptures and installations that often echo early land art or Minimalist aesthetics, but engage with current, social, and existential issues surrounding both public space and everyday designs, and how these influence our behavior and mindsets.
Their new body of sculptural works continues the artists’ ongoing interest in how we interact withspatial contexts.

In a new large-scale installation on the ground floor of the gallery, the entire room seems to have chewed up an expanse of urban streetscape. The massive, broken shards of asphalt stack up like the wreckage left in the wake of an arctic icebreaker and recall both Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1824) and early land art projects by Michael Heizer and Richard Long. Their flat black surfaces are embedded here and there with the remnants of common street fixtures—the anchor pole for a lost traffic sign, twisted metal that may have once been a bike rack. These tools that once were used both to limit and to encourage social use of public space are now gone or at least useless. But what happened to them, who is to blame, and what comes next are questions left for the viewer to puzzle out.

Examined in strictly formal terms, this composition in black, grey, and silver has a unified beauty. Yet it is just as undeniable that viewers would feel inconvenienced if they encountered a similar—albeit probably less pristine—stack of debris on the street. Through the artists’ finely-tuned design decisions, we as viewers are able to perceive this image of dysfunctional public space in a dangerously pleasing manner. The installation not only raises questions about our shared public spaces, but also about the setting of the gallery itself, by displacing the broken pieces of the street and presenting them within the bourgeois grandeur of the private gallery room.

The contemporary white cube figures quite literally in the exhibition’s next work, a polished stainless steel street sign with no instructions or warnings to be found. Titled “Adaptation”, this new series of mirrored signage reflects the spatial context: instead of a warning or a direction printed on the sign board’s surface, the viewer will see the image of him- or herself in the space. The street sign is here reduced to pure form, which adapts to its surroundings rather than being a tool for controlling and directing.

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin – Paris 3

Galleries — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:28:50 +0000

Emmanuel Perrotin’s Gallery represents : Chiho Aoshima, Daniel Arsham, Herman Bas, Sophie Calle, Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Coffin, Johan Creten, Matthew Day Jackson, Wim Delvoye, Elmgreen & Dragset, Lionel Esteve, Daniel Firman, Bernard Frize, Guiseppe Gabellone, Gelitin, Duane Hanson, Jesper Just, Bharti Kher, Kolkoz, Klara Kristalova, Guy Limone, Jin Meyerson, Farhad Moshiri, MR., Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Paola Pivi, Claude Rutault, Michael Sailstorfer, Aya Takano, Tatiana Trouve, Piotr Uklanski, Xavier Veilhan, Peter Zimmermann