Elmgreen & Dragset’s monumental ‘Eight’ reimagines the pool as collective space
The Danish Norwegian artist duo unveils a meditation on public access and shared imagination at the Hirshhorn Museum's newly revitalized Sculpture Garden, before bringing their most ambitious project to New York.
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The swimming pool has long held a particular resonance in artistic practice, its surface and form suggesting something far more than mere recreation. For Elmgreen & Dragset, the pool becomes a vehicle for exploring the democratisation of space, the promise of shared experience and the potential for collective imagination to transform an empty vessel into something vital.
‘Eight’, their monumental new commission for the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, embodies this philosophy with elegant simplicity. Opening at the institution’s newly revitalized Sculpture Garden this Saturday, the work extends a thread the artists have woven through decades of practice: the pool as metaphor for access, for togetherness, for community itself.
The sculpture arrives at a moment when public spaces are increasingly precious, when the invitation to gather and imagine together feels resonant and necessary. Though ‘Eight’ appears empty, the artists suggest, it is precisely this emptiness that holds possibility. Visitors are invited to fill the void with their own projections, their own sense of what such a space might mean.
The work speaks to the Hirshhorn’s own mission: a museum conceived as a gathering place, a space where art belongs to the public imagination rather than remaining sequestered behind velvet ropes. There is something generous in this gesture, something that refuses the hermetic exclusivity that can sometimes mark contemporary art practice.
The opening of the revitalized Sculpture Garden marks a significant moment for the institution, and the placement of ‘Eight’ at its heart suggests a deliberate curatorial philosophy: that monumentality need not be about dominance, that scale can serve contemplation rather than spectacle, that the most powerful artworks often invite us to complete them ourselves.
Following its debut in Washington, D.C., Elmgreen & Dragset will bring one of their most ambitious projects to date to their presentation space in New York on November 5th. The dual unveiling signals a particularly rich moment in the artists’ practice, a moment when their decades long investigation into space, access and the social potential of art reaches new dimensions.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
