More than almost any other artist, Marcel Duchamp changed our view of art with his work and his writings. By declaring an everyday object to be a work of art and revolutionizing art history as the inventor of the readymade, he became the mastermind behind an entire generation of conceptual artists. To this day, his ideas remain astonishingly relevant.
For the first time, we are presenting our extensive Duchamp holdings in an exhibition. Influential works, such as the readymade "Bottle Dryer" and the glass object "La Bagarre d'Austerlitz" meet important loans, including the artist's authorized copy of the so-called "Great Glass" from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The works are complemented by the Duchamp archive of the Swiss artist and researcher Serge Stauffer, who compiled it during decades of study of Duchamp. The "100 Answers" with which Duchamp responded to Stauffer's "100 Questions" in 1960 provide special insights into Duchamp's artistic thinking and show Stauffer's extraordinary research activity.
With 100 questions and 100 answers through the exhibition
Stauffer's excessive dialogic engagement with Duchamp is also central to the exhibition's mediation: 100 postcards to take home form a parcours through the exhibition. The cards contain 100 questions and 100 answers about the history of the works on display and about Duchamp's life and work as a whole.
What is special about this is that the design of the 100 postcards and their installation in the exhibition was developed for the Staatsgalerie by the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Kosuth is particularly influenced by Duchamp and has been closely associated with Stuttgart since he taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s.