Museums often ask us to behave. Move slowly. Look carefully. Keep distance. Trust the frame. Elmgreen & Dragset have built an entire practice around disturbing that obedience.
At the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Berlin-based artist duo now stages Stillleben mit Gemüse, an exhibition that spreads across the entire museum rather than sitting neatly inside one gallery. Running from May 20, 2026 to January 17, 2027, the show places their sculptures and installations in dialogue with the Städel’s architecture and its 700-year collection, turning the museum into a shifting game of reality, illusion, and misrecognition.
The exhibition’s centre is built around two large-scale installations: The Cloud, imagined as a high-end restaurant, and Garden of Eden, an office landscape. Positioned on separate floors, the two environments create a quiet collision between labour and luxury, aspiration and exhaustion, surface and machinery. The museum becomes less a place of passive viewing than a strange social theatre where every familiar space begins to feel slightly wrong.
That wrongness is where Elmgreen & Dragset are strongest. Their work often looks seductive before it becomes unsettling. A room appears ordinary, then reveals itself as a trap. A figure looks familiar, then becomes uncanny. A public institution suddenly feels like a private drama. The artists do not simply install objects in space; they rewrite the rules of how that space behaves.
Throughout Stillleben mit Gemüse, their interventions appear among the museum’s historic collections, interrupting the usual rhythm of art history. Instead of treating the permanent collection as untouchable, they make it part of a larger narrative system, pulling the visitor into what the Städel calls an active game of storytelling. Everyday details, institutional routines, social conventions, and overlooked gestures become charged with humour, critique, and theatrical tension.
What makes the exhibition feel so alive is its refusal to explain too much. Elmgreen & Dragset are interested in the moment when the viewer becomes unsure: of what is staged, what is functional, what belongs, and what has been quietly displaced. That uncertainty becomes a way of thinking about the museum itself: who it serves, what it hides, what behaviours it produces, and how much authority we give to the spaces around us.
In Frankfurt, Elmgreen & Dragset do not destroy the museum. They make it act. And once the institution starts performing, it becomes impossible to look at it innocently again.
Installation view, Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben met Gemüse, May 20, 2026 – Feb 27, 2027, STÄDEL MUSEUM, Frankfurt, Germany © 2026 ELMGREEN & DRAGSET / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), New York
Photography by NORBERT MIGULETZ, courtesy of STÄDEL MUSEUM