Elmgreen & Dragset’s Zero (2018) is a schematic interpretation of a pool. It is reduced to its essential components: a hollow oval describes the contour of pool, a diving board and ladder provide the essential visual clues for an otherwise starkly formal work. The direct, bodily size of the work makes it become like an individual, a character. Engaging in the tradition of Minimalist sculpture, both in simplicity of form and slickness of materials, Elmgreen & Dragset have transformed the pool, an icon of leisure, into a visual motif across their artistic production. The artist duo’s interest in pools and their accoutrements began in 1997 with their first in a series of Powerless Structures, a diving board that juts out of a window and into the abyss. Since then, notable examples have included Death of a Collector (2009) at the 53rd Venice Biennale. The work, in which a figure floats face-down in a pool, offers a pointed critique of the excesses of commodity culture and its potential outcomes. More recently, their large-scale public work, Van Gogh’s Ear, presented by the Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Plaza in 2016, also reoriented the pool vertically. The work’s thought-provoking title derives from the fabiform contour afforded by this new vantage point. A large-scale version of Zero was presented at the Bangkok Art Biennial in 2019.