NEW YORK, NY.- This spring, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will transform the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center with a large-scale new work. Van Gogh’s Ear is a sculpture, which takes the form of a swimming pool sitting upright. Its cyan blue interior, adorned with a polished stainless steel ladder, bright lights, and a diving board, opens up to the public traveling down Fifth Avenue, across from Saks Fifth Avenue. Conceived specifically for this site, where fashion, commerce, tourism, business, and art collide, the work playfully contradicts our expectations of both this familiar object and iconic site. Elmgreen & Dragset: Van Gogh’s Ear will be free to the public and on view April 13 through June 3, 2016. The exhibition is organized by Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer. Following its presentation at Rockefeller Center, the K11 Art Foundation will travel Van Gogh’s Ear to China.

Displayed as if in a high-end retail showroom, the work continues the idea of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which debuted a century ago and featured ordinary objects elevated to the level of high art by the choice of the artist. In contrast with these works, which were often only slightly modified, Elmgreen & Dragset have carefully designed and crafted each detail of Van Gogh’s Ear to mimic a garden pool. Re-positioned in a pedestrian plaza surrounded by the busy life of tourists, skyscrapers, and businesses, the pool stands out as a surreal object uprooted from its usual environment. The sculptural elements of the pool itself—from the curves created by the different depths and its overall shape, to the protruding diving board—become apparent when it is singularly presented vertically and above ground. Elmgreen & Dragset render the pool devoid of function via its displacement, and in turn, prompt a simultaneously more cerebral, poetic, and aesthetic approach to the actual object as well as its setting.

"Tishman Speyer has been working with the Public Art Fund for nearly two decades to bring some of the world’s most spectacular art to Rockefeller Center, and this is one of our most ambitious projects so far,” said Tishman Speyer President and Chief Executive Officer Rob Speyer. “Balancing at the end of the Channel Gardens, with the iconic 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the background, this unique sculpture will truly change the Midtown Manhattan landscape and become one of New York City’s must-see destinations. Elmgreen & Dragset’s work explores the intersection of art, architecture and design, and this exhibit epitomizes their creative journey. We look forward to bringing it to New York City and the world.”

“For many years, Elmgreen & Dragset have been masters of the unforgettably uncanny object. With its dramatic scale, wildly incongruous setting, and cleverly macabre title, Van Gogh’s Ear promises to be perhaps their wittiest installation yet. At the same time, the artists have revealed the stunningly sensuous potential of the garden-variety swimming pool, enhancing and revealing its curvaceous form, blue interior volume, and immaculate hardware. The result is a sculpture of extraordinarily strange beauty,” said Nicholas Baume, Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator.

“The sculpture recalls the 1950s-style pools found in front of some Californian private homes, in contrast to this very public East coast urban setting. It is as if an alien spaceship had landed in the midst of this prominent and busy environment. One can dream of lazy days under the sun while surrounded by all the traffic and business going on at Rockefeller Plaza. The title Van Gogh’s Ear plays on the mythological versus the ordinary. We thought it was a perfect name for a swimming pool of this shape. It opens up the possibility for a different perception of the form itself. And like the myth of Van Gogh cutting off his ear in despair, the dislocated pool will hopefully make people wonder ‘why?’, and pursue their own reasoning behind this inexplicable scenario,” said Elmgreen & Dragset.

Like Elmgreen & Dragset’s previous public project Prada Marfa (2005), a faux Prada store located in the middle of the West Texas desert, Van Gogh’s Ear brings attention to its context through its otherness. The swimming pool motif is closely linked to several of the duo’s other recent works including their iconic Death of a Collector installation for the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. The work included the body of a “collector” floating face down in his pool, outside of the two buildings, which the artists conceived of as homes. They have also presented Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 (1997) and Powerless Structures, Fig. 13 (2014), a diving board installed to penetrate a window at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and at the Punta della Dogana in Venice, respectively.