Elmgreen & Dragset Is Now Represented by Pace Gallery – ARTnews.com

Pace Gallery, one of the art world’s top business enterprises, has added the Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset to its roster. News of the new representation marks the second such development this month, after Pace started working with Sonia Gomes, who is also represented by Blum & Poe and Mendes Wood DM.

The Elmgreen & Dragset representation is also a collaboration, with Pace now counting as the ninth gallery currently representing the duo worldwide, alongside Galería Helga De Alvear, König Galerie, Kukje Gallery, Massimo De Carlo, Victoria Miro, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Perrotin, and Taka Ishii Gallery. “We are trying very hard to bring collaboration between galleries to the center stage,” Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery’s president and CEO, told ARTnews.

Elmgreen & Dragset are widely known on the international circuit for sculptures that play as witty subversions of scale and place. A spirit of prankishness runs through much of their work: In 2016, the artists turned Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art into a faux art fair, with Elmgreen & Dragset’s own work purportedly on offer. And in remote Marfa, Texas, the duo has a long-running installation called Prada Marfa, which appears to be a luxe fashion store on the side of a barren stretch of road crossing an otherworldly landscape.

“Every aspect of their practice is an incredibly positive element of our art world,” Glimcher said. “They are great tricksters—conceptual artists who make work, especially sculpture, that shifts perspective—not just in the art world but in life.”

Elmgreen & Dragset’s first Pace-related project will be in East Hampton, New York, though it won’t appear inside the gallery’s soon-to-be-inaugurated pop-up space there. Instead, it will be an installation—Short Story (2020)—on a tennis court with two bronze figures taking the form of players at the end of a match.