Elmgreen & Dragset

Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique is pleased to present October 2025, Elmgreen & Dragset's second presentation at Pièce Unique in Paris.

For this exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset present a hyperrealistic sculpture of a gallery assistant installed directly in Pièce Unique's window, visible to anyone passing along rue de Turenne. Normally hidden behind the exhibition space, the gallery's office is brought forward: a large desk occupies the front of the gallery, behind which the assistant slumps forward, apparently asleep.

Visible through Pièce Unique's window both day and night, passersby are invited to contemplate the woman's situation. Who is she? Is she napping, or shutting herself off from the outside world for a moment? Is she exhausted, or simply refusing to do her job, like a modern-day Bartleby? The ambiguity leaves space for multiple readings. As with much of Elmgreen & Dragset's work, October 2025 blurs the line between fiction and reality, pulling the viewer into the story and prompting them to form their own narrative.

Elmgreen & Dragset are known for immersive installations that reconfigure museums and galleries into new environments. At Pièce Unique, the transformation is subtle. The architecture of the space itself remains unchanged; the disruption comes entirely from the presence of the sculpture. Like their 2005 work Prada Marfa, a forever-locked Prada boutique along a remote stretch of desert highway in Texas, October 2025 introduces an unexpected element, creating a moment of pause or reflection. Both works make use of the store front window as a signifying meeting point with the audience.

October 2025 opens almost exactly one year after L'Addition, Elmgreen & Dragset's exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. For this show, the duo staged sculptures of contemporary male figures in the museum's main hall, some suspended upside-down from a temporary structure. By inverting the traditional display, Elmgreen & Dragset created a space where classical sculpture and alternative representations of masculinity met. In October 2025, the duo continues this exploration of visibility, perception, and the rituals of cultural spaces, this time in the unassuming setting of a small gallery.

Michael Elmgreen was born in 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset was born in 1969 in Trondheim, Norway; they have been working as an artist duo since 1995. They live and work in Berlin. With the intention of revealing and redefining the art world, its cultural institutions and their fruition from the public, Elmgreen & Dragset draw inspiration from the everyday world, criticizing through a strong and unsettling sense of humor the contemporary social and political structure. They are well known for their numerous public architectural and performative installations, including Prada Marfa, a Prada shop located in the middle of the desert of Texas realized in 2005, and Short Cut, where due cars were rising out of Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in 2003, produced together with Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Elmgreen & Dragset constantly challenge their public and its imaginary through the creation of images that are as shocking as spectacular.

Elmgreen & Dragset were appointed curators of the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017). They were awarded a Special Mention at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) for The Collectors at the Danish and Nordic Pavilions and won the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2002).