At Pace in Chelsea, NYC: Elmgreen & Dragset Build the Oval Office in Steel

Pace Gallery has filled its 508 and 510 West 25th Street spaces in Chelsea with TRANSITION, a new exhibition by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. It runs through January 16, 2027.

The centerpiece, also titled Transition, is an almost full-scale model of the White House Oval Office made in Corten steel. It measures about 3.6 meters high, 9.1 meters long and 8.6 meters wide. Every administration since the late twentieth century has redecorated the room with its own drapery, furniture, paintings and carpets. Here all of that is stripped away, and what remains is volume, material and weight. The artists split the room into two arch-shaped halves, like a pair of giant brackets around a void, so the monument can also be walked through.

The piece speaks formally to Richard Serra's curved steel sculptures, the Torqued Ellipses in particular. As with Serra, movement activates it: angles and curves reveal themselves gradually, and no single vantage point gives the whole. Recognizing the Oval Office may come only partway through the walk. A space designed to project authority becomes opaque and reticent.

In the adjoining gallery hangs the Balcony Series. Silkscreened images of balconies from royal palaces and presidential residences sit on circular, mirror-polished steel panels. The heads of state appear only as cut-out silhouettes, so viewers can only guess who they are, and the cut-outs reflect whoever stands in front of them along with the room itself. The source images are altered newspaper photographs rendered in black-and-white raster, evoking a mid-century world order as it reached the public through print. The circle, recalling a peephole, a camera lens or a telescope aperture, replaces the rectangular press-photo frame and suggests looking rather than recording.

The duo are known for large-scale institutional transformations that fuse the typology of one space with another. For anyone making the rounds of the West 25th Street galleries, this is a show where political architecture is felt through scale and material rather than explained.