Having been kicked out of its longtime home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Gagosian is starting over in the neighborhood with a new space on the ground floor of 980 Madison Avenue, the same building where it formerly had a multilevel gallery.
Because Gagosian is such a force within the art industry, the inauguration of the new Upper East Side gallery will be closely watched by market observers. But the show being staged there, opening on April 25, is also an event for more art historically minded types.
Inaugurating the space is an exhibition for Marcel Duchamp, whose art rarely appears in commercial settings. Running in tandem with the Museum of Modern Art’s recently opened retrospective, the show is being held in the same place where Duchamp had a New York exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1965, when the artist’s reputation was not quite what it is today.
“It all started with Duchamp,” dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, adding, “I couldn’t imagine a better artist or a more critical body of work to be the first exhibited in our new gallery at 980 Madison, a building he showed in just over sixty years ago.”
Included in the show will be replicas of Duchamp’s most famous readymades, including a 1964 version of Fountain, his 1917 sculpture composed of a urinal stood on its side. Duchamp worked to create these replicas with dealer Arturo Schwartz that year, in part to resolve a practical issue: the originals for some of his most famous sculptures had been lost. But as the MoMA show argues, Duchamp also did this as a conceptual strategy, to degrade the value of the original and question what counted as a copy.
Also among the works in the show is a 1964 version of Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel), his 1913 readymade composed of a bicycle wheel planted in a wooden stool. According to Gagosian, this readymade is the only version of Bicycle Wheel not held by a museum.
A Gagosian spokesperson declined to comment on whether the exhibition was a selling one, and the gallery’s announcement did not specify whether the objects in it were loans. (Gagosian periodically stages shows of historical art that have included loans, with their press releases typically stating when the gallery has borrowed works from institutions.)
Marcel Duchamp, Roue de Bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel), 1964 (after lost 1913 original).
Photo Owen Conway/©2026 Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Gagosian
Duchamp’s work is highly sought-after on the market, due both to his art historical importance and the limited amount of his art still available for purchase. Few of the readymades in the 300-work MoMA show belong to private collectors.
On the rare occasions when Duchamp works do make it to market, they sell for large sums. His auction record was set in 2009 with the Christie’s sale of Belle Haleine – Eau De Voilette (Beautiful Breath – Veil Water), a 1921 sculpture in which a perfume bottle is covered in a label referring to Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego. Formerly owned by the designer Yves Saint Laurent and his onetime partner Pierre Bergé, it sold for $11.5 million at the auction house’s Paris branch, outpacing its estimate six times over.
His “Boîte-en-valise” works—small suitcases stuffed with miniature versions of his readymades and paintings—also periodically come to auction, selling in the low seven figures.
This is the first time that Gagosian, one of the world’s biggest galleries, has held a Duchamp solo show since 2014. That show also appeared at 980 Madison Avenue.
Gagosian first opened an office in the building in 1987, then went on to lease units on multiple floors as gallery space. In 2023, Artnet News reported that Gagosian and other galleries in the building were getting kicked out after the building’s management gave over most of the property to Bloomberg Philanthropies. The last show staged at its prior location was a well-received survey of Jasper John’s crosshatched paintings.
