Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been working together as the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset since 1995. Using sculpture, performance, and installation, they investigate questions of identity, social relationships, and power structures. They often use everyday items or architectural elements in unexpected or absurd ways, reconfiguring the objects to subvert their intended functions and present them as sculptures. Elmgreen & Dragset’s public artworks often play with their environment to recontextualise it, alter perceptions, and create new meanings.

Elmgreen & Dragset have had numerous solo exhibitions at art institutions worldwide, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou Metz, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Astrup Fearnley Museet, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, UCCA in Beijing, and Kunsthalle Zürich. Among their many public sculptures, the most widely known work is Prada Marfa in Texas. Other works include Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime in Tiergarten in Berlin, Han in Helsingør, and Van Gogh’s Ear which has been exhibited in New York and Hong Kong. In January 2021, the permanent site-specific work The Hive was inaugurated in the Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station, New York City. Elmgreen & Dragset curated both the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the entire 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017. They were awarded honorary doctorates from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim in 2015 and were the 2020 laureates of the B.Z. Kulturpreis in Berlin.

Elmgreen & Dragset were artists of the year 2021 and their sculpture Life Rings is the second sculpture acquired by the Princess Estelle Cultural Foundation thanks to gifts by Lisen & Richard Båge, Ulrica & Paul Frankenius, and an anonymous donor. It is the artists’ first public artwork in Sweden.