Eight
The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced the acquisition of a monumental new sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset, an artist duo celebrated for large-scale installations that investigate the complexity of societal norms and structures. Commissioned for the Sculpture Garden, “Eight” (2026) extends the artists’ decades-long preoccupation with the pool motif.
Cast in stainless steel with a lacquered cyan interior, and furnished with a diving board, ladder and lights, “Eight” evokes ideas of leisure through the form of a typical backyard pool. Upended, empty and eternally unswimmable, the 28-foot-tall sculpture emblematizes the artists’ mastery of displacement—excerpting familiar objects from people’s surroundings and presenting them as new and strange. Placed like a beacon at the north entrance to the Hirshhorn campus, inside the Sculpture Garden, the large, bright artwork delivers a playful introduction to the national museum of modern and contemporary art. The immediate appearance of the artwork winks to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, though “Eight” is entirely sculpted and handcrafted.
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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.