A fake Prada store installed in the middle of the Texas desert in 2005, a drowned collector floating in a pool at the Venice Biennale in 2009, a contemporary art center transformed into a fictional art fair in Beijing in 2016, a giant ear-shaped pool erected vertically at Rockefeller Center in New York the same year, a car embedded in the middle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, an upside-down city of miniature buildings hanging from the ceiling of the Moynihan Train Hall in the heart of Manhattan in 2021… Elmgreen & Dragset’s immersive installations and environments have marked the world of contemporary art over the past twenty decades.

Invited to take over the main nave, the forum, and the rooftop galleries of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Scandinavian duo of Dane Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian Ingar Dragset return with a vengeance to unsettle us. Reproducing urban environments populated by highly realistic silicone figures, absorbed in various activities, like so many protagonists in imagined narratives, they always manage to transform these spaces into desolate landscapes…

Their world, tinged with irony and nonchalance, often impertinent and burlesque, bordering on the absurd, even surreal at times, is also profoundly melancholic. And often macabre. Consider their pensive teenagers enclosed on balconies suspended in mid-air, the door opening onto a corpse amidst the rows of metal compartments in a morgue, bunk beds facing each other, or sinks tethered by their pipes… Whether bizarre or morbid, these installations are designed to disrupt the social and spatial markers ingrained in our collective unconscious. “[…] iIt is possible to change […] perceptions, aesthetic conventions – by surprising people " Elmgreen stated in Artspace in 2020.

OBSTRUCTIONS AND DESTABILIZATION

Thus, Elmgreen & Dragset disrupt our sense of space and time from the very beginning of the exhibition, blurring the lines between inside and outside and erecting, in the heart of the museum's forum, a life-size housing project. In the main nave, " the line between fiction and reality is becoming increasingly blurred ": prey to a labyrinthine space unfolding scenes of daily life, from the theater to the public toilets, passing through a laboratory, a conference room, a morgue, a surveillance room and a disused office, the visitor discovers a world both familiar and unsettling, where the ordinary is reinvented to become extraordinary ". " As in a dream (or a nightmare?), ordinary situations follow an incoherent logic where rules no longer apply. With an almost unsettling familiarity, these situations generate a feeling of discomfort and unease. The strangeness intensifies as the viewer encounters bizarre characters, such as a young man asleep on the conference room table, dressed in a rabbit costume, or a tightrope walker who has slipped and is clinging to his wire with only one hand. 1. » As many as « fictionalized realities and incongruous situations that may evoke the surprises and pitfalls of a video game on a human scale 2”. Hence the title of the exhibition: “ Good luck "...

1 Chiara Parisi, curator of the exhibition (excerpt from the catalogue)
2 Elmgreen & Dragset, excerpt from the conversation with Chiara Parisi, published in the exhibition catalogue

“ELMGREEN & DRAGSET – GOOD LUCK” CENTER POMPIDOU-METZ
1, PARVIS DES DROITS-DE-L'HOMME, METZ
UNTIL APRIL 1, 2024
CENTREPOMPIDOU-METZ.FR
AND ALSO COMING SOON
“ELMGREEN & DRAGSET” PERROTIN GALLERY
76, RUE DE TURENNE, PARIS 3RD
FROM OCTOBER 14 TO NOVEMBER 18, 2023
PERROTIN.COM