France – Metz
A fake Prada store installed in the middle of the Texas desert in 2005, a collection floated in a swimming pool at the Bienal de Venecia in 2009, a contemporary art center transformed into a fictional art fair in Beijing in 2016, a swimming pool in the form of a gigantic earpiece erected vertically in the Rockefeller Center of New York this year, a check mark encrusted in the middle of the Galería Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan, a city of buildings in miniature which is based on the technology of the Moynihan Train Hall in full Manhattan in 2021… The installations and immersive attractions of Elmgreen & Dragset han already had its color in the world of contemporary art during the last decades.
Invited to occupy the great ship, the forum and the paintings of the galleries of the Centro Pompidou de Metz, the two scandinavo formed by the artist Danés Michael Elmgreen and the new artist Ingar Dragset view with force to destabilize. Reproduciendo entornos urbanos poblados por figuras de silicona de gran realismo, abortas en diversas actividades, aso protagonistas de historias por imaginar, siempre consiguen convertiblelos en ambientes desoladores… Y es que su universo, teñido de ironía y desenfado, voluntariamente impertinente y burlesco, rozando el absurdo e inclusive, a veces, el surrealismo, is also deeply melancholic… There is a menu of macabra. For example, our thoughtful teenagers surrounded by balconies suspended in the air, the door that has a corpse in the middle of a pile of metal compartments of a deposit of corpses, the literas enfrentadas or the sinks united by their tubes… Bizarres or morbidas, these are Installations pretend to track social and spatial references in our unconscious collective mind. “… it is possible to change […] perceptions, aesthetic conventions… surprising people”, wrote Elmgreen in Artspace in 2020.
Obstruction and destabilization
Just at the start of the exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset trastocan nuestros pointos de referencia espacio-temporales difuminando límites entre el interior y el exterior, erigiendo un piso de protection official a tamaño real en el corazón del foro del museo. In the Great Nave, “the border between the fiction and the real is diffused aún más”; near a laboratory space filled with scenes of common life, from a theater to a public center, past a laboratory, a conference room, a corpse depository, a surveillance room and an office above, the visitor discovers “a world a la vez familiar e worrying, where the ordinario reinvented itself to become extraordinary”. “Como en sueño (¿o una pesadilla?), las ordinarias situaciones siguen una incoherent logica en que las glas ya no seplican. Con una familiaridad casi worryante, these situations engendran a sensación de incomodidad y malstar. The extrañeza intensifica when the spectator is seen with Estrafalarios people, like a young person sleeping on the table of the conference room, dressed in a conejo costume, or a tightrope walker who was rescued and attached to his cable with a hand”. 1 [There are many “fictitious realities” and incongruent situations that evoke the surprises and actions of “a human video game” 2. From the title of the exhibition: “ Good luck “… ].
- Chiara Parisi, curator of the exhibition, fragment of the catalog.
- Elmgreen & Dragset, excerpt from the conversation with Chiara Parisi published in the exhibition catalog.
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET – GOOD LUCK
Until April 1, 2024
Center Pompidou Metz
1, Parvis des Droits-de-l'Homme, 57000 Metz
https://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/fr/programmation/exposition/elmgreen-dragset
ADEMÁS PROXIMAMENTE
Elmgreen & Dragset Exhibition at Galería Perotin
From the 14 from October to the 18 from November
perrotin.com