WASHINGTON, DC.- 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.
A crowning installation in the garden, recently revitalized by artist-architect Hiroshi Sugimoto and due to reopen Oct. 31, “Eight” is the fourth in the artists’ series of backyard swimming pool sculptures to be installed for public encounters, including sites in New York and Miami.
“The installation of ‘Eight’ caps a landmark commission almost five years in the making and signals the imminent reopening of our Sculpture Garden,” said Aaron Seeto, acting director of the Hirshhorn. “We expect Elmgreen & Dragset’s new work will excite interest and visitation through our expanded front door. The artwork’s elliptical shape responds to the Hirshhorn’s geometry, both architect Gordon Bunshaft’s original 1974 plan as well as Sugimoto’s revitalization of our garden, to inspire conversations about the importance of art and ideas.”
“For us, swimming pools can be synonymous with public access, togetherness and community—like the Hirshhorn,” Elmgreen & Dragset said. “‘Eight’ appears empty, yes, but ready to be filled by the imaginations of visitors. We are honored to be part of this important collection and reopening installation.”
“Elmgreen & Dragset are virtuosos of transformations within both the traditional confines of galleries and outside,” said Anne Reeve, Hirshhorn curator. ‘Eight’ presents a confluence of ideas and impressions that we hope will inspire the curious to engage with the questions—and rewards—that modern and contemporary art can encourage.”
“Eight” was acquired through the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund with support from the New Carlsberg Foundation.
Michael Elmgreen (born 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (born 1969, Trondheim, Norway) are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. Among their most well-known works are “Prada Marfa” (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texan desert, and “Short Cut” (2003), a car and a caravan breaking through the ground, first exhibited in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, and now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The duo has realized several sculptures in public space, including “Van Gogh’s Ear” (2016), presented first by Public Art Fund at the Rockefeller Center in 2016 and now installed at K11 in Wuhan, and “Bent Pool” (2019), permanently installed in Pride Park, Miami Beach. In December 2020, the “The Hive” was installed permanently at Moynihan Train Hall, where it welcomes visitors entering this renovated extension to Penn Station in New York. Their sculpture “Maybe (Not)” was inaugurated at Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans Museum of Art, in 2024. In 2025, they installed “K-BAR” in Khao Yai Art Forest, a new open-air museum in Thailand. In Berlin, the artists won the German government’s competition for a “Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime,” which has been permanently installed in Tiergarten park since 2008.
They have held numerous solo exhibitions at art institutions worldwide, including Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2026); the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul (2024–2025); Kunsthalle Praha, Prague (2023–2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–2024); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022), EMMA—Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2020–2021); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019–2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018–2019); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); UCCA, Beijing (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2014); SMK National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2014); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–2014); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2011); ZKM Museum of Modern Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Tate Modern, London (2004); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2001).
Their work has been included in numerous biennials and triennials, including Bangkok (2018, 2024), Melbourne (2023–2024), Istanbul (2001, 2011, 2013), Liverpool (2012), Singapore (2011), Moscow (2007, 2011), Venice (2003, 2009), Gwangju (2001, 2006), São Paulo (2002) and Berlin (1998). 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 curated the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017.
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. They received the 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation in 2021.
