Eliana Willis

A show celebrating the Dada pioneers Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp at Brussels’ Bozar, brings together artworks, design objects, and written documents from the couple whose professional relationship deeply informed their private life, and vice versa.
E. Linck, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp in front of puppets (1918) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
Hans Arp was a German-French artist born in 1886 in Alsace-Lorraine, an area historically contested between France and Germany. He adopted the name Jean after Alsace became French territory in the 1910s, but continued to call himself Hans when speaking German.
Hans/Jean Arp, Head with Annoying Objects (1933) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
After studying art in both countries Arp settled in neutral Switzerland after faking mental illness, to avoid the German draft. It was at an exhibition in Zurich in November 1915 that he experienced what he termed “the greatest event of my life”: meeting Sophie Taeuber.
Hans/Jean Arp, Composition (c. 1929) © SABAM Belgium 2024, photo: Mick Vincenz.
Taeuber was born in Switzerland in 1889, studying at German art schools before returning to her home country during the First World War. The pair married a month shy of seven years after their first meeting. Arp and Taeuber-Arp are now considered two of abstract art’s most important artists, after a period of re-evaluation saw the latter historically overshadowed by her husband. The show at Bozar brings their work together, presenting the artists not only as equals but as vital to each other’s practice.
Hans/Jean Arp with the navel monocle (1926) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
Walburga Krupp, the curator of “Friends, Lovers, Partners” has spoken of the couple’s symbiotic way of working: “Not only did each of them have an independent oeuvre, they also explicitly made duo-works, jointly exe­cuted, in which each of their individual styles could no longer be recognized […] Their working side by side as equals in their studio and in constant exchange reveals the similarities and differences between her geometric abstractions and his organic ones.”
Hans/Jean Arp, Man and Woman (c. 1928) © SABAM Belgium 2024, photo: Fabien de Cugnac.
The pair blurred the lines between fine and applied art. Taeuber-Arp created textiles and jewelry in addition to her paintings and sculptures for which she is better known, and Arp producing a large body of written work. The couple are particularly regarded for their contributions to the Dada movement which blossomed in Switzerland and Germany in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Taeuber-Arp’s Dada Head (1920) is one of the movement’s most iconic artworks.
Nic Aluf, Sophie Taeuber with the Dada Head (1920) © SABAM Belgium 2024.
More than 250 artworks are on display in “Friends, Lovers, Partners” including 230 paintings and 70 photographs, in addition to drawings, archival documents, sculptures, textile works, and jewelry. The show is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Bozar Books and Mercatorfonds which also includes diary and letter extracts from the couple and poetry by Arp, including his devastating verses written after Taeuber-Arp’s tragic death at 53.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tapestry (1924) © Photo: Roberto Pellegrini, Bellinzona.
Hans/Jean Arp & Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Friends, Lovers, Partners is on display at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts until January 19 2025, then at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter just outside of Oslo from February 20 to May 11 2025. More

A monumental exhibition celebrating the artist and author Tove Jansson opens at Helsinki Art Museum on October 25 as part of a series of events held around the country, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Moomins.
Jansson (born in 1914 and part of a minority of Swedish-speaking Finns) wrote the first of her Moomin novels, “The Moomins and The Great Flood”, in 1945, with a further eight books (plus five picture books) released over the following 48 years. The characters are beloved by children and adults around the globe.
So popular are the Moomins in Jansson’s native Finland that in 1993, the year of her final Moomin picture book ‘Songs from the Moominvalley”, a Moomin-inspired theme park was opened in Kailo, designed after Jansson’s drawings. The author’s birthday, August 9, is also celebrated across the country, as Finnish Art Day.
Tove Jansson in her studio © Eva Konikoff.
According to legend, the inspiration for the series of characters came from a warning Jansson received from her uncle as a child. He said that a “Moomintroll” lived in his kitchen and would punish her if she stole food. The design for the white, almost hippopotamus-like beings, were apparently born out of an unkind caricature Jansson drew of the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Although her legacy is certainly dominated by the popularity of the Moomins, Jansson had her own successful art practice separate from her work as a children’s book illustrator and author. Having studied art in both Stockholm and Paris, Jansson mounted seven solo shows in Finland during her lifetime and was commissioned to create major murals across the country. She also illustrated the books of other authors including J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and Lewis Caroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland“.
Tove Jansson, Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
Jansson’s life, particularly her lifelong partnership with the artist Tuulikki Pietilä (which began more than a decade before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Finland) was the focus of a 2020 biopic. “Tove” was directed by Zaida Begroth and starred Alma Pöysti.
The new exhibition “Tove Jansson: Paradise” celebrates Jansson’s illustrious career with a focus on the murals she created during the 1940s and 1950s. These were mostly made in Helsinki, where Jansson was born and spent the vast majority of her life. Sites included the City Hall restaurant, a children’s hospital, a local electromechanical factory, and a girls’ school.
Tove Jansson, sketch for Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Kirsi Halkola.
“Tove Jansson’s created her public works during Finland’s postwar reconstruction period, aiming to spread hope and joy” Arja Miller, the Museum Director of Helsinki Art Museum told Artnet News. “[This show] celebrates her remarkable range as an artist, while emphasizing her desire to bring hope and delight to everyday life. In today’s ever-changing, often uncertain world, her work feels more relevant than ever—reminding us of the power of art to inspire, uplift, and create a sense of connection.”
Tove Jansson, Party in the City (1947) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Hanna Kukorelli.
More than 180 objects and artworks relating to Jansson’s public art projects are on display, taking up over 4,200 square feet across two floors of Helsinki Art Museum. HAM will also be celebrating the 10th anniversary since its reopening in 2015 following major renovations. Jansson’s murals Party in the Countryside and Party in the City (both created in 1947) are part of HAM’s permanent collection.
Tove Jansson, Niilo Suihko and Party in the City © Per Olov Jansson.
Also included are six life-size charcoal mural sketches, which have never been displayed publicly before. In fact, many were unrolled for the first time since their creation for their inclusion in this show. In addition to preparatory paintings and sketches, there are photographs, works on glass, videos and book covers. One such cover will be for Jansson’s popular 1972 novel “The Summer Book”. A film adaption starring Glenn Close premiers this month at London’s BFI Film Festival.
Tove Jansson, Party in the Countryside (1947) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Hanna Kukorelli.
Jansson’s debut solo show was held at the Bäcksbacka’s Konstsalongen gallery in 1943, and paintings loaned from the collection of the Bäcksbacka family will be on display in the exhibition. Visitors to HAM will also be given a sneak-preview of a new documentary following Jansson’s creation of her only altarpiece, which she made for Teuva Church in South Ostrobothnia in 1953.
Unrolling of Tove Jansson’s preparatory charcoal studies at HAM: sketch for Bird Blue (1953) © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.
James Zambra, a relative of Jansson and the Creative Director at Moomin Characters Ltd. told Artnet News that the show is a “a deeply personal and meaningful celebration of Tove’s legacy” and that there’s “no better way to kick off celebrating 80 years since the debut of her first story in the Moomin series.” “Tove Jansson: Paradise” is on view at HAM from October 25 to April 6 2025. More

In the 16th century, a small sliver of the world became the pulsing nexus of a new world order—and with it blossomed one of the most robust eras in the history of Western art.
“Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks,” an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, tells the story of the rise of small-but-mighty Flanders from 1400 to 1700, through a curation of some 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and objects (on view through October 25). Oil painting makes up the backbone of the show, with over 130 canvases on view by towering artists including Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel, and Anthony Van Dyck, among many others (including several women).
View of the exhibition Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks. Photo MMFA, Denis Farley
“This period is important because it had such an outsized impact on the history of art,” said Chloé M. Pelletier, the curator of the Montreal installation of the show. “Here we see the invention of oil painting and the flourishing of the publication industry. The print trade is largely based in Antwerp. In the late 16th century, Antwerp is also at the center of trade for vast global empires.” A new class of people arose in its wake, including middle- and upper-class merchants, bankers, and industrialists with disposable incomes who became engaged in the art world, and the nascent art market, and reshaped what art could be in a wholly novel way.
“Artists in this era had more possibilities of what they could create. It wasn’t just the Church commissioning an altarpiece,” said Pelletier, “There’s a merchant who wanted a portrait or a devotional work for their own home. The market becomes richer and richer and new genres arise to meet that market. Landscape painting emerges for the first time as an independent genre. We see genre scenes or scenes of daily life as well as those of raucous behavior.”
View of the exhibition “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks” 2024. Photo MMFA, Denis Farley
Curated thematically, rather than chronologically, the exhibition hopes to draw in new audiences who might have preconceived notions of what Flemish art is, and what this show is decidedly not is somber and stuffy. With extensive and rare loans from the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp, Belgium, which co-organized the exhibition with the Denver Art Museum, viewers are given a sweeping and often sumptuous and at times downright bawdy window into the world of Flemish art. In Montreal, the exhibition is bolstered by 14 additional works from the museum’s collection. “It’s a new way to present this period in a way that’s more dynamic and gives people an access point,” said Pelletier.
Accompanying the exhibition is a sprawling, 432-page richly illustrated catalogue by Katharina Van Cauteren, the chief of staff of the Phoebus Foundation, who spearheaded the exhibition. After Montreal, the exhibition travels to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Massachusetts.
With one week left in the Montreal location, we chose a few of the dazzling artworks on view that might help you see Flemish art in a whole new way.
Frans Snyders, A Pantry with Game (ca. 1640)
Frans Snyders, A Pantry with Game (about 1640). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.

Frans Snyders’s monumental still life A Pantry with Game greets viewers at the entryway to the exhibition, setting the tone for the visual abundance that awaits. Synders, who was a trailblazing still life painter in the 17th century, here builds up a toppling abundance of foods—fowl, lobster, artichokes, wild boar, rabbits, asparagus, fruits, and much more—in the foreground of the composition. The bounty looks as though it might tumble out from the canvas, or the viewer, alternately, might be able to step right in.
A cup of berries, a shiny lobster, and a bright red tablecloth add a dynamic focal point, at the center, holding the disparate elements together. While imagery such as this would have appealed to the new class of merchants with country homes where they arranged big feasts, the painting also offers a concurrent symbolic reading between desire and restraint at work that would have been legible to people of its time. The leashed dogs on the left of the canvas signify these contradictory impulses between indulgence and reserve.
Jan Massys, Riddle, The World Feeds Many Fools (ca. 1530)
Jan Massys, Riddle: The World Feeds Many Fools  (about 1530). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
As the exhibition title “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools” suggests, one section of the exhibition focuses on the weird and wonderful comedic scenes of the era.  Sometimes paintings of “fools” were intended as warnings against the pitfalls of various temptations. Other times, these over-the-top absurd scenes were intended to engage viewers in a visual game. The painting above, for example, is a rebus, a visual puzzle the viewer is asked to solve. Four symbols appear above the two jester-like men, which form a pictorial riddle. When said aloud the names of the four symbols sound similar to the Dutch idiom  “the world feeds many fools.”  These popular visual riddles are not unlike the meme-culture associating language and imagery we know today.
Hendrick de Clerck and Denijs van Alsloot, The Garden of Eden with the Four Elements (1613)
Hendrick de Clerck and Denijs van Alsloot, The Garden of Eden with the Four Elements (1613). © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
This visually dazzling painting in oil on copper is a quizzical, but not uncommon mix of Christian and mythological imagery. The painting is the work of two artists. Hendrik de Clerck, a painter of altarpieces and other devotional pictures, who began to focus on cabinet pieces, painted the figures while the landscape is by an artist named Denis van Alsloot. Personifications of the four elements—air, fire, water, and earth—occupy the center of the composition, each surrounded by their defining attributes. These mythical figures are juxtaposed with biblical stories relating to Adam and Eve. Floating above the scene is a heavenly scene of god and a choir of angels. The painting, which hints at European colonial expansions through the exotic animals and fruit pictures, perhaps suggests an idealized scene in which the world exists harmoniously under Christianity.
Michaelina Wautier, Everyone to His Taste (ca. 1650)
Michaelina Wautier, Everyone to His Taste  (about 1650) © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
This is one of several paintings by women artists included in the exhibition. In her own time, the artist Michaelina Wautier carved an unlikely, but celebrated path as an unmarried woman artist. Born to a wealthy family, her brother was also a painter, and Wautier, in the relative safety of her position, cultivated her talents painting still lifes as well as portraits and history paintings. Over the centuries Wautier was written out of history, with many of her works attributed to her brother. Only a few years ago did a true reappraisal of her legacy begin.
In this tender and exquisitely luminous painting, two boys interact; one boy in white holds an egg with a bite taken from it while another boy in black reaches as though to snatch it. Wautier represented children in her work on several occasions including a painting of boys blowing bubbles that’s in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Here the luminous handling of whites and the rosy cheeks of the boys is captivating and so life-like that one is tempted to reach out for the egg, too.

Peeter Neeffs the Younger and Gillis van Tillborch, Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet (1652, and ca. 1675)
Peeter Neeffs the Younger and Gillis van Tillborch, Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet (1652, and about 1675) © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium.
Perhaps no painting better encapsulates the entirety of the “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools,” than Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet. In the early 1600s, a new kind of collector had emerged—the connoisseur. These collectors were knowledgeable about the qualities that defined different artists and genres. With these connoisseurs concurrently arose the ‘kunstkammer’ or the collector cabinets where rooms of artworks and objects were displayed together. These rooms were sometimes depicted on canvas, too. Elegant Couple in an Art Cabinet represents the genre well. The bourgeois Flemish interior features a couple at the center, with recognizable paintings such as Titian’s Rape of Europa and Jacob Jordaens’ Mercury and Argus. What’s truly fascinating about this composition, however, is that macro-XRF scans reveal that the couple was a later addition and that an original group of three male connoisseurs examining the paintings had been painted over. Such paintings reveal that collector cabinet paintings, too, changed hands and were conceived as adaptable scenes that changed with new collectors, a living, shifting creation, rather than a static entity.

Catarina Ykens II, Vanitas Bust of a Lady (1688) 
Catarina Ykens II, Vanitas Bust of a Lady (1688). Courtesy of the Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp, Belgium
This uncanny image is the work of the artist Catarina Yken, the daughter of artist Jan Ykens. Her paintings are rarely known today, but she is best known for her still-life paintings, especially flowers. This unusual scene of oil paint on oak panel is both a morbid and comic vision. A brown-hued skull with white tufts of hair sits atop a lifelike woman’s bust draped with a pearl necklace, at the bottom of her décolletage, a sprig of leaves and berries catches the attention of a bird perched on her shoulder. Flemish artists, acquainted with the realities of death through war and illness, maintained their characteristic sense of levity. More

Two very different Minimalist exhibitions are wrapping up this week in New York, from masters of their respective rivulets, Doug Wheeler and Ad Reinhardt. Both reveal the meticulous complexity that goes into creating something deceptively simple. They have radically varying styles and approaches, but both reach for the sublime.
David Zwirner’s 20th Street location is hosting both shows. The 84-year-old Light and Space pioneer Wheeler’s dreamlike installation “Day Night Day” occupies the ground floor. “Print—Painting—Maquette,” which primarily explores Reinhardt’s late-period printmaking, is on the floor above. Both exhibitions close on October 19. Although the shows are unrelated, they forge such a fluid, accidental dialogue that they feel interconnected. They offer a welcome antidote to the unbearable strife of the news cycle— Reinhardt’s abstractions are serene and cerebral, while Wheeler provides an immersive, otherworldly experience.
Doug Wheeler, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24” (2024). © Doug Wheeler. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Visitors must don protective disposable booties over their shoes to not scuff the pristine matte and gloss white floors of the installation component of Wheeler’s exhibition, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24.” Four visitors are allowed in at a time for two-and-a-half-minute intervals, and the waitlist fills up, so come early. Photos and videos are also not allowed. Viewers enter a room with two faintly glowing rectangular walls. I was initially chuffed and satisfied just by this sole component, until a gallery staffer explained that I could walk through it.
Doug Wheeler, “DN ND WD 180 EN – NY 24,” 2024 © Doug Wheeler. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
The wall’s illusory solidity is so palpable it triggers a confusing split second of fear as you trepidatiously step into it and enter a heavenly void where you are surrounded by limitless, luminous space. It’s a transcendent experience, and one that can’t be captured in any of the corny, high-tech experiential exhibitions currently proliferating. Upon exiting the celestial afterlife void, be sure to hang a left to see the artist’s intricate drawings detailing the plans for the work, gorgeous ink and graphite schematics.
Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette,” David Zwirner, New York, 2024. © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
There are also plenty of preparatory studies at Reinhardt’s “Print-Painting-Maquette,” one flight up. The abstract Minimalist (1913–67) has always been an artist both buoyed and stymied by his subtlety—when it comes to photographing his work, the nuances of his chromatic explorations are lost. Those “black” monochromes might read as just one murky, matte shade in a photo, but they encompass a rich, inky world of various hues and almost subliminal patterns.
Ad Reinhardt, Printer’s maquette for Untitled from X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters) (c. 1964). © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
The exhibition was curated by Jeffrey Weiss, formerly curator and head of Modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and organized in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation. The 1966 screenprints attest to “his interest in translating the subtleties of his painted work into the print medium,” according to press materials. It’s revelatory to see his diagrams for the prints, based on earlier paintings. This is the first show devoted to these prints, but the various small paintings also included are a more magnetic, visceral draw, creating an intriguing counterpoint to the main focus.
Taken in together, the shows are an intriguing journey into light and darkness.
Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt: Print—Painting—Maquette,” David Zwirner, New York, 2024. © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Doug Wheeler, “Day Night Day,” and Ad Reinhardt, “Print—Painting—Maquette,” are on view at David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, through October 19. More

In a city like Paris, full of monuments to famous conquests and heroic figures from history, the artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset take a different tack. For a new exhibition at the prestigious Musée d’Orsay, their vision is to bring a different cast of characters into the room, masculine protagonists, and ones of a more fragile nature. The artists will remind you, too, that these characters have always been there with us throughout history. We just tend to forget them, because they get written out of the hero tales we tell ourselves. They are in soft focus.
Their exhibition, called “L’Addition,” opens to the public this week at the French institution, a venue that presented some unique challenges even for these seasoned artists. The rules at the Musée d’Orsay are different. For one thing, the museum’s main concourse is open six days a week, so installation timelines were tighter than usual, leaving less room for improvisation or error. Another thing: The institution’s 19th-century sculptures and paintings had to remain in place, staying right where they have been for some 40 years, since the former Gare d’Orsay train station was first converted into a museum. Absolutely nothing could be rebuilt or reworked. “There are a handful of museums in the world that this is worth the sacrifice for,” said Dragset.
Elmgreen & Dragset L’Addition Musée d’Orsay Nave October 15, 2024 – February 2, 2025 Installation image credit: Image courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Musée d’Orsay. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, 2024
A Mirror World
For these two artists, subverting or playing with the museum structure is a core aspect of their practice. One of their early works was of an animatronic bird, installed between the interior and exterior glass at the Tate Modern in 2004. It was twitching on its back. Their very first sculpture was of a diving board, and it penetrated surrealistically between the interior and exterior of the museum wall at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. “We always do some kind of transformation and we use a museum as our material,” noted Michael Elmgreen. “And the Musée d’Orsay is not a place that is normally up for big changes.”
Since 2006, the museum has been building contemporary art into its historic program with ongoing temporary exhibitions called “Correspondences.” But this marks the first time that the grand hall, with its most iconic Belle Époque clock looming above. It is a place of deep history and identity for Paris. The duo, then, have flipped the museum’s concourse on its head with some “additions,” an intervention Dragset described as a “queering of the space.”
In spite of the main hall’s epic beauty, it remains a passageway that visitors move through in order to get to the Van Goghs. “It’s an overlooked part of the museum in a way,” said Dragset. “People perceive it as almost ambient.”
Elmgreen & Dragset L’Addition Musée d’Orsay Nave October 15, 2024 – February 2, 2025 Installation image credit: Image courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Musée d’Orsay. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, 2024
They innovated a replica of the floor that hangs above the 19th century sculptures in marble and bronze. In this reflected area overhead, a sort of shadow world, Elmgreen and Dragset have hung their sculptures depicting soft and poetic visions of masculine youth upside down. “Fragile depictions of masculinity have been written out of art history,” Elmgreen said. The two wanted to focus on “the expectations one still has of young male persons and what they’re supposed to become.”
A hyperrealistic sculpture of a boy hunched over a piece of paper, drawing a stick figure rendition of David, which appears towering above him in a painting of a bacchanalian Roman scene, a sumptuous painted critique of Rome’s decadence. He’s also crossed the delicate barrier that protects the painting from the public. “We could somehow imagine that we are at a similar stage of our culture before it implodes,” said Dragset. “They are probably having more fun, but that also imploded when it became moralistic and puritan.”
Youth
Nearby Eugène Guillaume’s marble rendering of the Greek poet Anacréon, who has his arm outstretched to receive a small bird on his hand is Boy With Drone (2024). He echoes the gesture of the poet, but is about to let his toy machine lift off. Another young masculine figure sits (well, hangs) on a laundry machine, presumably waiting for his clothes to clean; it echoes a tradition in painting depicting society performing of quotidian tasks. Another of Elmgreen and Dragset’s figures gazes out from a V.R. headset, hands on his hips.
It is hard to say how old these figures should be—they seem to exist in a suspended period of youth somewhere between 12 and 20. “These are our children growing up in troubled times,” Elmgreen said before a large group of guests that had gathered in the hall during its press preview earlier this week.
Elmgreen & Dragset L’Addition Musée d’Orsay Nave October 15, 2024 – February 2, 2025 Installation image credit: Image courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Musée d’Orsay. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, 2024
Behind the two artists loomed one of the most striking works of the show: a boy standing at the edge of a diving board, contemplating the marble expanse below him. Carved in stark white, he cuts a peculiar figure against the ornate opulence of the museum’s domed ceiling. “When a child is looking off a diving board, which is the bravest decision, to jump or stand back down?” he added.
The metaphor of waiting for adulthood seems to also be a stand-in for wider societal change as well; a sense of a pent-up potential energy is almost palpable when you look at this new group of sculptures. Everyone is alone and waiting, in between two action points in a plot line. They feel deeply melancholic, captured in interior states.
Elmgreen & Dragset L’Addition Musée d’Orsay Nave October 15, 2024 – February 2, 2025 Installation image credit: Image courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Musée d’Orsay. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, 2024
Questions & Answers
The origin story of Elmgreen and Dragset is one of human connection, and it is both romantic and almost fateful. They met in a nightclub in Copenhagen.  They pieced together that, by chance, they lived in the same building; they were a couple for many years before amicably splitting—their art practice exists, they have said, as a child they share.
When we met at their studio in Berlin in late September, we stood among the sculptures set to head to the French museum. The converted water facility in Neukolln makes for a striking workspace: It is resplendent, and not far from the river, on a quiet cobblestone street, with towering factory-like ceilings (a good height for prototyping their towering boy on a diving board). The interior balcony is set up with working spaces for their team members, and an in-house chef was preparing lunch. They always eat together when possible. The top floor of the studio is an exquisite apartment with a grand piano, a library of books, and a suspended fireplace. We drink from Moomins mugs.
Elmgreen & Dragset L’Addition Musée d’Orsay Nave October 15, 2024 – February 2, 2025 Installation image credit: Image courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Musée d’Orsay. Photography by Andrea Rossetti, 2024
“We are attempting to understand what’s going on around us, what’s happening to the world,” said Dragset. “It’s probing and testing, a research into what’s happening to us emotionally rather than trying to find answers, because they are probably not there.” There is a political bent to all their work, but a tidy answer does not emerge, nor do their exhibitions preach a moral lesson. They do, however, conjure empathy.
It is an interesting moment to take up the question of the male gaze. There are important discussions about the male gaze as it is directed to women, but the male gaze also lingers on itself, on young men and idealized male bodies. “Feminism has been much better at discussing women’s position in society, whereas men are still finding complexity in conversations around masculinity,” said Dragset.
“Watching” (2024) presented at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Elmar Vestner
The Gaze and Technology
The two say they watch keenly how the public navigates their installations, which always have a dramaturgy that incorporates interactive elements. One feels a natural pull to build out a narrative, and they nurture this by planting some prompts. For their major exhibition that recently opened at the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Korea, a hyperrealistic sculpture of a young woman sits alone in a realistic restaurant that the duo completely designed and invented. She is on her phone, listening to a looping FaceTime call; a photograph of that same character seems to reappear in another part of the installation, a luxury apartment that they duo built inside the museum. The audience may try to piece these strands of a narrative together, but it would be in vain.
Visitors to their shows often pull out their phones, too. There is something particularly captivating about Elmgreen and Dragset’s work when it comes to online consumption. Their famous work Prada Marfa, installed in rural Texas in 2005, came years before Instagram; by now, it has become an influencer destination and a self-sustaining internet phenomenon and not the hidden land art project they intended it to be. Many of their sculptures reflect the duo’s concerns about the isolating aspects of technology and of how we, as viewers, relate to technology, with the audience’s own connection to it becoming an integral part of the experience.
“The Conversation” (2024) presented at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Elmar Vestner
The pieces invite a form of self-reflection—just as the VR-goggle-wearing youth in Paris is immersed in technology, so too is the woman in the Korean show, absorbed in her digital world, in a private moment in a public space. This mirroring highlights the pervasive role of technology in our lives, prompting viewers to question their own engagement with it.
The artists are always intrigued by which elements of their work resonate most with audiences. It’s often surprising which details capture attention. For example, in the Korean exhibition, a fridge magnet in the fictional restaurant that reads “Home is the place you left” has become a focal point, with many visitors sharing it online.
This detailed-oriented engagement, even through social media and phone screens, is something Elmgreen and Dragset find encouraging. “It creates a dialogue that previously didn’t exist in the art world. You’d present your work, people would visit, but you rarely got direct feedback or insight into their reactions,” says Elmgreen. “Now, there’s a whole new level of communication between the artist and the audience.”
The artists are comfortable with the varying interpretations and evolving meanings of their works. “It’s like parenting grown-up children,” Dragset explains. “Once they’ve left the house, you can’t control their lives. You offer something, and the world interprets and uses it in its own way.”
L’Addition is on view from October 15 through February 2 at Musee-d’Orsay. More