Interview: Elmgreen & Dragset

09/01/19

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset 

Since unveiling a decaying public swimming pool as part of their major overview exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery back in September, Elmgreen & Dragset – the Berlin-based, Scandi artistic duo comprising Michael Elmgreen (b1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b1969, Trondheim) – have been the talk of the town. Their often parodic and playful work, of course, was already familiar to Londoners and tourists alike (even if the artists’ names remained unknown), as their 4.1-metre golden sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse, Powerless Structures, Fig 101, had regally crowned Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for 18 months from February 2012 – throughout the London Olympic Games – attracting largely positive responses, including from British actress Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the piece, describing herself as ‘thrilled’ to be revealing such a ‘completely unthreatening and adorable creature’ to the public.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Mark Wallinger

18/03/16
Interview: Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger: ID
Hauser & Wirth
26 February - 7 May 2016

The walls of Hauser & Wirth’s North Gallery are hung with huge canvases, dominated by looming black shapes, smeared on, with vast hand gestures, mirroring themselves and each other, demanding interpretation in the same way as a Rorschach test. The paintings – Vitruvian in measure, at twice a man’s height tall and an arm-span wide – are from a series of id Paintings by the Turner Prize-winning artist, Mark Wallinger (b1959). They form part of his new exhibition, ID, his debut solo show at the gallery, focusing on Freud’s interrogation of the psyche, the self and the subject. Easy to miss, beside these towering inky smears, is a much smaller work, Ego (2016), comprising two iPhone photographs of Wallinger’s hands, posing as a playful recreation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

Next door, in the South Gallery, Wallinger has installed a life-size, mirrored, revolving replica of the New Scotland Yard sign, here signifying the superego, with its all-seeing, controlling eye – a nod to some of his more political works of the past. The back rooms house the smaller video pieces: Orrery (2016), Shadow Walker (2011) and Ever Since (2012), each one taking the viewer on a journey, much as they did Wallinger during the creative process.

After giving a guided tour of the exhibition, Wallinger spoke to Studio International about his own journey and the – sometimes subconscious – messages and significations implied.

Read this interview here