Marcel Duchamp
The art of being cramped
The gallery’s third exhibition dedicated to Duchamp, this presentation, combining ready-mades, drawings, sound recordings, editions and rarely shown pieces, is part of a broader current trend, echoing the major retrospectives planned for 2026–2027 at MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou – Grand Palais.
It features several central pieces from Duchamp’s constellation: the Kodak Box from 1914, the Green Box, the Suitcase Box, all fragments that condense, displace, and recompose. A few essential pieces mark the exhibition—Le Peigne, Air de Paris, three different versions of L.H.O.O.Q.—as well as a rare collection of works on paper: the first sketch for the Tamis du Grand Verre, a rare signed check from 1963, and a youthful caricature, grating and ambiguous (Ni homme, ni femme, pas même Auvergnat), in which an androgynous figure emerges for the first time—like a prefiguration of Rrose Sélavy.
Conceived as a retrospective in miniature, the exhibition seeks neither to demonstrate nor to bring together, but to illustrate a few essential fragments of an artist who has constantly blurred the lines between the author, the work and its reproducibility. Organizing a retrospective in the intimacy of the gallery at 36 rue Jacob amounts to replaying the gesture of the Boîte-en-valise: it is not the work as a whole that one attempts to fit into a restricted space, but a condensation of his gestures, his thoughts and his techniques.
