Entering the Berlin studio of installation and performance artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset is a curious, immersive experience. For 10 years now, the duo has worked in a towering warehouse in the city’s now hip Neukölln district. A marble statue of a pointing child greets you on the way in; a crane has been converted to hold an overhead office space; and their 14-person team gathers daily for lunch in an open kitchen. When I meet them, they are a day away from shipping the final sculptures and paintings to Los Angeles for their forthcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery, “The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.”
Picture an installation anchored by a (silicone) gallery assistant asleep at her desk; a sculpture of men in VR goggles, holding each other in a tender embrace; and a series of circular paintings of the sky embedded with mirrors to create a kind of optical illusion. Each of these works will appear at Pace LA twice: first at full scale and then—in a second room where the ceiling is half as high—at half scale.
The exhibition references a neurological disorder called Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS). “When the person suffering from it is very exhausted, they can’t scale things, so things might appear bigger or smaller than real life,” explains Elmgreen. “That was the trigger for making the show, our inspiration source. Then we thought, What do we do for a show in LA in 2025 in this crazy world that is more absurd than our wildest dreams?” (The arrangement also presented an amusing challenge to its white-cube setting: “How will the gallery market this?” Dragset muses with a laugh. “If it’s half size, is it half-price?”) The novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, whose 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation saw a nameless protagonist doing everything she could to sleep her way through her life (and a blue-chip art gig), will join the artists for a talk at the gallery on Friday.
Such transformations of the gallery environment have been a regular feature of the pair’s practice since 1995, when their collaboration began. Over the years, they have turned galleries into nightclubs, spectacles of ancient ruin, active construction zones, and derelict swimming pools. But they’re perhaps most famous for Prada Marfa, the fake Prada store they installed in the rural Texas desert as a new interpretation of land art in 2005.
After 30 years together, the two continue to combine sculpture, architecture, and wryly comedic performance to slyly take on structures of power. Humor is a constant in the work, as is a queer lens. “We try to challenge business as usual,” says Elmgreen. “We often have done what we call ‘dressing the white cube up in drag.’ You change its identity for at least a certain period.”
The idea is to give the audience a new perspective, whether on a physical place or a notion such as masculinity. “You alter the role of the viewer in a way so you empower the spectator,” says Dragset.
Neither artist intended to enter the art world. Dragset hails from Trondheim in Norway. “It’s like three degrees below the polar circle, so it’s far away and not so big,” he says. “We didn’t have an art museum.” He moved to Copenhagen to pursue avant-garde theater in the early 1990s. During the same period, the Danish Elmgreen was grappling with the realities of life as a poet. “Can you imagine how many poems are distributed in Danish?” he says. “I was thinking it’s a bit strange to put so much effort into making a book and cutting a lot of trees for such a small audience. I started to write text that would morph on computer monitors in front of people’s eyes. I had to show it somewhere—it happened to be an art space.”
The two met by chance at a Copenhagen nightclub called After Dark. Discovering they lived in the same building, they walked home together. They were a couple for many years after that.
Their first project was a series of knitted sculptures for an exhibition in Stockholm. “People were supposed to interact with the sculptures,” says Elmgreen. “They were a bit stiff,” adds Dragset, “so we ended up sitting in each corner of the space, holding our sculptures. That was an accidental beginning.” The next pieces involved knitting performances. A Parisian curator took note and invited them to join a group show.
Starting out at a time when the Nordic art world was still on the fringes allowed the pair to do what they wanted. “We were doing performances because Ingar came from theater,” recalls Elmgreen, “and we could freely experiment because it was a completely different art world back then. There wasn’t such a hard pressure on young artists to be profitable.”
Their position as outsiders became a key part of their work. “Since we didn’t have a formal art education in university or art academy, I got a bit shocked by all these rules and regulations and the hierarchies that are embedded in the [gallery] space,” says Dragset. “We really took the white cube itself as a symbol of the power that’s embedded in architecture. And then started playing with it.”
The pair’s first sculpture, Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 (1997), was of a diving board penetrating a panoramic window overlooking the sea. It was created for Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and sits there again today.
Prada Marfa was one of their first permanent pieces of public art. “That was due to our fascination with land art,” explains Dragset. The replica of a Prada shop—complete with six handbags and 14 right-foot shoes that were almost immediately stolen when the installation formally opened—sat on a highway near Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation. With the work, the two were speaking to fashion’s invasion of the art world, the hypermasculinity of so many land-art monuments, and gentrification, all at once. Ranchers showed up to the opening commenting on how bizarre it was. Later, with the rise of Instagram, the installation took on a life of its own; even Beyoncé posted about her visit.
“Prada Marfa was how we got fascinated with this space where people haven’t asked for an experience,” Dragset says. “Today, we enjoy having museum shows and gallery shows, but we also really appreciate doing pieces that are just there, out in the wild—chaotic anarchy of public life.”
Twenty years on, Elmgreen and Dragset have 25 permanent public sculptures at locations across the globe. In October, during Frieze in London, they’ll team up with Prada—formally this time—to present an installation. They’re also preparing an exhibition for Frankfurt’s Städel Museum next spring, in which their sculptures will interact with pieces from its permanent collection. “We’re looking at how to make an exhibition something that isn’t too static, that can still develop and experiment,” says Elmgreen. “Hopefully we don’t get too good at it.”
“The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” is on view at Pace Los Angeles from September 13 to October 25, 2025.