October 2025
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is pleased to announce 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 will open 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.
The Artist
Elmgreen & Dragset (b. 1961 in Copenhagen, Denmark and 1969 in Trondheim, Norway) are a Berlin-based artist duo who have collaborated since 1995. Their practice explores questions of identity and belonging, focusing on the discourse that emerges when objects are reconfigured and recontextualized and traditional modes of art presentation are altered.
They have held solo exhibitions at major art institutions including Musée d’Orsay (2024), Amorepacific Museum of Art (2024), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2023), Fondazione Prada (2022), The Nasher Sculpture Center (2019), The Whitechapel Gallery (2018), and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2016). In 2009, they received a special mention for their exhibition The Collectors in the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Elmgreen & Dragset are well-known for their large-scale public works, including Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a full-sized vertical swimming pool first presented by Public Art Fund at the Rockefeller Center, and Prada Marfa (2005), a replica of a Prada boutique sited along U.S. Route 90 the middle of the Texan desert. The Hive (2020), a to-scale inverted cityscape, is permanently on view at Moynihan Train Hall in New York City. The artists won the German government's competition for a “Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime,” which has been in Berlin’s Tiergarten park since 2008. In 2025, K-BAR (2024), a bar dedicated to the late artist Martin Kippenberger, was installed in the middle of Khao Yai Art Forest in Thailand.
The artists were shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000) and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2002). In 2012 Elmgreen & Dragset were selected for London’s Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square. In 2015, the artists received honorary doctorates at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and in 2020 they were awarded the B.Z.-Kulturpreis in Berlin. The artists were awarded the 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation in 2021.