The motif “Prada Marfa Lenbachplatz” by Elmgreen & Dragset can be seen on the Billboard Lenbachplatz from October 1st to mid-December. This presentation marks the end of the hotspot for art in public space in the middle of the city center after eleven years. From 2013 to 2024, a total of 60 artists showed their work on the double-sided 5×5 meter billboard, 54 Munich and 6 international artists. The exhibition format, which is popular not only in the Munich art scene, is to be reinstalled elsewhere in Munich’s urban space in 2025.
Elmgreen & Dragset have placed a billboard depicting their iconic work Prada Marfa in Munich’s Lenbachplatz. On one side is a photograph of the installation itself—a stand-alone Prada boutique situated along a desert road. The other side shows a marker indicating the distance from Lenbachplatz to the work—9,219 kilometers. Since Elmgreen & Dragset installed Prada Marfa on their own initiative in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in 2005, it has remained sealed shut, although it contains stilettos and handbags from Prada’s fall 2005 collection. Removed from its usual urban environment, the store can never serve as a place of commerce and negates the transient nature of fashion and trends. Elmgreen & Dragset have described the project as a Land Art project with Pop Art undertones, letting different “-isms” exist together.
In the center of Munich, the desert landscape on the billboard contrasts with its surroundings. Among Lenbachplatz’s grand nineteenth-century buildings, the small, unassuming white adobe structure of Prada Marfa seems out of place. At the same time, the piece, which is located less than a kilometer away from Munich’s own luxury shopping area, plays with the language of commerce and advertising that is common in urban contexts. The Bavarian capital is known for its upscale shopping and services while also priding itself on easy access to nature. Prada Marfa underscores the city’s contradictions while also raising questions about our relationship to the natural world: what do we expect from nature today, and is our relationship with it purely extractive? What do our projections onto nature—and the images we create of it—say about us?
This work is an allusion to the project A Space Called Public / Hoffnung Öffentlich by Elmgreen & Dragset from 2013, for which the duo realized thirteen art projects in public places in Munich. The billboard at Lenbachplatz was also erected for this purpose, with a work by Ed Ruscha. With the final use of the billboard by Elmgreen & Dragset, the art at Lenbachplatz comes full circle.
The artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset live and work in Berlin and London.
