Mega gallery Gagosian has announced that the first exhibition in its new Upper East Side space will be dedicated to the storied French artist Marcel Duchamp.
The show brings together all of the Dada pioneers’ most celebrated readymades, and will run from April 25 through June 27 at their new gallery on 980 Madison Avenue. It runs concurrent to the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of the artist, which opened last week, marking Duchamp’s first retrospective in the United States in more than 50 years.
The move to inaugurate the space with a survey of Duchamp’s readymades holds significant historic value, as it is the very same building where the editions were first shown in New York in 1965. At the time, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery showed in the space. The pieces in Gagosian’s show were produced in 1964 by Duchamp in collaboration with Italian gallerist Arturo Schwarz.
Many of the originals were produced in the 1910s but had been lost or destroyed in years past, including Fountain (1964, after 1917 lost original), L.H.O.O.Q. (1964, after 1919 original), Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Dryer) (1964, after 1914 lost original), and Boîte-en-valise (1935–49; contents 1935–41). Also included in the show is Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel) (1964, after 1913 lost original), which is the only surviving example of these works that does not belong to a major international institution.
“It all started with Duchamp, 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,” shared gallery founder Larry Gagosian in a press statement.
Gagosian’s new ground-floor space at 980 Madison Avenue is a stone’s throw from the gallery’s former Upper East Side exhibition space and headquarters upstairs, which they vacated last April, after Bloomberg Philanthropies bought out the building in 2024.
With the new gallery, however, Gagosian was able to stay in the building by securing a ground-floor lease, thus keeping the same address that has been their flagship for the last 35 years.
