Paris · 19/10/2026
Elmgreen & Dragset: Les Fous d’En Face
Galerie Max Hetzler presents Les Fous d’En Face, a new exhibition by Elmgreen & Dragset timed to coincide with Art Basel Paris. It is the duo’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and their first in its Paris space, spreading across both of the gallery’s venues at 46 and 57 rue du Temple. The title translates as “The Fools on the Other Side”. The exhibition brings together three new installations that build on core elements of the artists’ practice – absurdist humour, spatial subversion and open-ended narrative – and is partly shaped by reflections on their own pasts. Displaced from their usual contexts, the objects draw attention to the forces at work in situations and memories that define both the extraordinary and the familiar, the extreme and the mundane. Together they represent three approaches to sculpture that are central to Elmgreen & Dragset’s way of working: the hyperreal, the recontextualised and the readymade. The first installation, How to Become an Artist, shows a skinny young boxer in red gloves standing in a full-size boxing ring. Picked out by a circular spotlight like a lone actor on a stage, he slumps against the ropes, exhausted. His opponent is nowhere to be seen. The hyperrealistic figure is a portrait of Michael Elmgreen as a young man, which gives the staged scene a deeply personal charge. Seen in this light, the lonely, weary fighter raises the question of what kind of bout he has just fought, and against whom – if there was ever an opponent at all. The viewer is left to dwell on a fragile moment of existential uncertainty. The second installation, The Optimist, is a large red sphere set in the middle of the white gallery wall. Sleek and minimal in form, it is in fact an oversized clown’s nose cast in steel. Accompanied by the sound of applause playing from an old radio, the white wall itself appears to turn into the enormous face of a clown. Since the 1990s Elmgreen & Dragset have treated the white cube as sculptural material, most notably in their Powerless Structures series, but here the gesture is again tinged with self-portraiture: before becoming a visual artist, Ingar Dragset studied at The Commedia School in Copenhagen in the early 1990s, where clowning was a formative part of the curriculum. The final installation, Il mio Giardino, consists of a monumental white figurative sculpture strapped to the roof of a red vintage Fiat 500. Absurdly large, the reclining male figure towers over the little car, creating a surreal physical tension between human and machine; for all its imposing scale, the figure appears tied down and helpless. Two miniature red boxing gloves dangle from the rear-view mirror, recalling the boxer across the street. Like the figure itself, the story is held in suspense, inviting speculation about what came before and what happens next. Is the sculpture being delivered somewhere – or is this a heist? Across all three installations, visitors become active participants in the work, left to work out for themselves who exactly the “fools on the other side” might be. Michael Elmgreen (born 1961 in Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969 in Trondheim) live and work in Berlin. Their work has been shown at institutions and in public spaces worldwide, including the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (2026); the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul (both 2024–2025); the Centre Pompidou-Metz and Kunsthalle Prague (both 2023); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (2020); the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019); the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and FIAC Hors les Murs, Paris (both 2018); Kunstmuseen Krefeld – Haus Lange Haus Esters (2017); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Grand Palais, Paris (both 2016); the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (both 2014); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013); and the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square (2012). In 2009 they represented the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Their work is held in numerous public collections, among them the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; mumok, Vienna; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.
