Hirshhorn Museum to Install ‘Eternally Unswimmable’ Pool by Elmgreen & Dragset in Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

When it reopens in a redesigned state at the end of October, the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., will be home to a curious new work by the Berlin-based Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset—in the form of a vacant swimming pool.

“Upended, empty, and eternally unswimmable, the 28-foot-tall sculpture emblematizes the artists’ mastery of displacement—excerpting familiar objects from people’s surroundings and presenting them as new and strange,” reads a press release announcing the museum’s new acquisition.

The outdoor sculpture—“cast in stainless steel with a lacquered cyan interior, and furnished with a diving board, ladder, and lights”—is titled Eight and counts as the fourth such swimming pool in a series that Elmgreen & Dragset has installed in other locations including Miami and New York. The Hirshhorn has deemed it “a crowning installation” for its Sculpture Garden, which is scheduled to reopen October 31 after a four-year, $68 million “revitalization” designed by the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.

In a statement, Elmgreen & Dragset said, “For us, swimming pools can be synonymous with public access, togetherness, and community—like the Hirshhorn. Eight appears empty, yes, but ready to be filled by the imaginations of visitors.”

Hirshhorn curator Anne Reeve called the artist duo “virtuosos of transformations within both the traditional confines of galleries and outside.”

Among Elmgreen & Dragset’s most notable outdoor works are The Memorial to the Persecuted Homosexuals under National Socialism, a concrete block with a window to watch a looped video that was installed in Berlin in 2008, and Prada Marfa, an ersatz fashion boutique installed on the side of a remote highway in West Texas in 2005.