White Cubes in Drag: Elmgreen & Dragset at 30

Step into the Berlin warehouse where Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset work, and the boundaries of art and life begin to dissolve. A marble child points its finger in judgment, a crane cradles an office above the floor, and their team gathers daily in an open kitchen. These small disruptions—their signature aesthetic—are preludes to the larger worlds they build.

Now, three decades into their collaboration and twenty years after the cult landmark Prada Marfa, the duo is staging their most surreal exhibition yet: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, opening at Pace Los Angeles in September 2025.

The Strange Logic of Scale

The exhibition borrows its title from a neurological condition where the perception of scale collapses: rooms stretch, bodies shrink, reality itself wobbles. Elmgreen & Dragset seize this instability and amplify it.

Visitors will encounter uncanny doubles: a gallery assistant asleep at her desk sculpted in silicone, figures in VR goggles locked in tender embrace, circular paintings of sky embedded with mirrors that trick the eye. Each work reappears at half-scale in a second gallery with a lower ceiling—a disorienting hall of mirrors where size becomes slippery, meaning unstable.

What is real? What is too big or too small? In a world already more absurd than our wildest dreams, scale is another theater of distortion.

– Elmgreen asks.

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Prada Marfa Turns 20

If their new exhibition feels like a plunge into disorientation, it also echoes the project that made them icons: Prada Marfa (2005). The faux luxury boutique stranded in the Texan desert began as a sly critique of land art’s machismo and fashion’s infiltration of the art world. Two decades later, it has become a pilgrimage site, blessed by Beyoncé’s Instagram and haunted by desert winds.

Like Prada Marfa, The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome balances critique and comedy. A work can bites, but always with a wink.

We often have done what we call ‘dressing the white cube up in drag.’

– As Elmgreen has said.

Outsiders Who Rewrote the Rules

Both artists came from outside the academy: Elmgreen from poetry, Dragset from experimental theater. Their first knitted sculptures in the 1990s were awkward, almost failures. But failure, too, became fuel. They began to treat galleries as stages—remaking them into nightclubs, ruins, or derelict pools.

That outsider stance remains central. Their sculptures challenge the architecture of authority, queering the systems of power embedded in museums, fashion, and urban space. Twenty-five permanent public works now stand around the globe, from Copenhagen to Seoul, each one a reminder that disruption can be permanent.

The Exhibition as Wonderland

For Los Angeles, they promise more than spectacle. They promise an invitation into uncertainty, a chance to feel the ground slip beneath the feet. With novelist Ottessa Moshfegh joining them for a talk, the show blurs not only scale but genres—literature, performance, sculpture—all colliding.

As Elmgreen & Dragset step into their fourth decade, their art remains restless, irreverent, and tender. They remind us that institutions are not immovable monoliths but stages in drag—ready to be re-scripted, re-costumed, re-imagined.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is on view at Pace Los Angeles from September 13 to October 25, 2025.