Image: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced the acquisition of a monumental new sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset. The 28-foot sculpture will greet visitors at the north entrance to the campus when the Sculpture Garden reopens on October 31.
Titled ‘Eight,’ the work marks Elmgreen & Dragset’s first commission by an East Coast museum. It takes the form of an upended, empty backyard swimming pool, fitted with a diving board, ladder and lights, making it permanently unusable as a pool.
The work exemplifies the artists’ practice of displacing familiar objects from people’s surroundings and presenting them as strange or newly encountered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995.
The artists associate swimming pools with public access, togetherness and community, while describing ‘Eight’ as an empty structure ready to be filled by visitors’ imaginations. The sculpture is part of the Sculpture Garden’s reopening after its recent revitalization by artist-architect Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Among Elmgreen & Dragset’s best-known works are ‘Prada Marfa,’ a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texan desert, and ‘Short Cut,’ a car and a caravan breaking through the ground.
