Elmgreen & Dragset: This is How We Bite Our Tongue


Quirky exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery of work by contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.

From the first room, where they had turned the space into a disused swimming pool, I loved this! The swimming pool was so realistic even down to the earth at the bottom of pool and peeling paint. The changing room at the side looked perfectly normal till you looked closely and found there were hinges and handles on both sides of the door.

I loved the approach of having no labels on the walls but giving you a good booklet with the commentaries in which were well written and informative. This made you look at the work and think about it before reading about it.

Heading upstairs you found smaller works from the last ten years. If you don’t think you know Elmgreen and Dragset’s work they did the boy on a rocking horse installation for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and these works were similar, being figurative and symbolic in style. “One Day” was a sculpture of a young boy gazing at rifle in a display case. I liked the fact you could walk round him and view the gun from his perspective.  The picture I’ve used is of “Pregnant White Maid”, a figure cast in bronze and painted white. It’s part of a series of maids. I like that this was shown with “Invisible”, a small boy hiding in a marble fireplace, it set up a dialogue between the pieces and a different narrative than when they were made.

Closes on 13 January 2019

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