Elmgreen & Dragset turn the Städel Museum into a stage of illusion, storytelling and unexpected encounters

Frankfurt’s Städel Museum is currently presenting Stillleben mit Gemüse (Still Life with Vegetables), a major exhibition by Elmgreen & Dragset, on view from May 20th, 2026, through February 27th, 2027. Extending across the entire museum, the project introduces a series of unexpected interventions that challenge familiar perceptions of art, architecture, and daily life.

Engaging with a collection spanning more than seven centuries, the Berlin-based duo places sculptures and installations throughout the galleries, where they enter into conversation with historic masterpieces and architectural details. The exhibition becomes a journey through shifting narratives, visual surprises, and subtle disruptions.

Elmgreen & Dragset art as a museum-wide intervention

A hallmark of Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice is their ability to unsettle the familiar. In Stillleben mit Gemüse, the museum becomes a theatrical setting where fiction slips into reality and ordinary expectations are quietly overturned.

Visitors move through the galleries like detectives, discovering works concealed among permanent displays and encountering unexpected dialogues between contemporary sculpture and historical art. Humour, ambiguity, and narrative remain central, prompting reflection on how museums shape cultural memory and authority.

‘The Cloud’ and ‘Garden of Eden’: labour and luxury in conversation

Among the exhibition’s focal points are two large-scale installations positioned directly above one another.

The Cloud evokes the atmosphere of an exclusive fine-dining restaurant—a world of aspiration, prestige, and carefully staged desire. Below it, Garden of Eden presents an office interior, drawing attention to the routines, ambitions, and pressures of working life.

Placed in vertical dialogue, the two environments contrast reward and effort, fantasy and routine, exposing the social structures that underpin contemporary life.

Figurative sculpture and new ways of seeing

Figurative sculpture serves as a guide throughout the exhibition. Human figures appear in unexpected corners and unlikely situations, inviting visitors to invent their own stories.

These scenes elevate overlooked moments into quietly charged tableaux infused with wit and social observation. Rather than offering fixed interpretations, the works leave room for speculation, touching on behaviour, power, institutional systems, and collective expectations.

Explore our dialogue with Elmgreen & Dragset on landscape as a cultural construct and the growing disconnect between reality and representation.