Gagosian to Open New Upper East Side Gallery with a Duchamp Show

After being evicted from his longtime home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Gagosian opened a new space on the ground floor of 980 Madison Avenue, a former multi-story gallery.

Since Gagosian is a force in the art world, the completion of the new Upper East Side gallery will be closely watched by market watchers. But the exhibition, which opens on April 25, is also an event for more people with an awareness of art history.

The space opens with an exhibition on Marcel Duchamp, whose art is rarely seen in commercial contexts. The exhibition coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s recently opened retrospective and takes place in the same location where Duchamp exhibited at New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1965, when the artist’s reputation was not what it is today.

“It all started with Duchamp,” dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, adding, “I can’t imagine a better artist or a more critical work debuting in our new gallery at 980 Madison, a building he exhibited in more than sixty years ago.”

The exhibition will feature reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous ready-mades, including a 1964 version of the work fountainhis 1917 sculpture consisting of a urinal stands sideways. Duchamp collaborated with dealer Arturo Schwartz to create these copies, in part to solve a practical problem: the originals of some of his most famous sculptures had been lost. But as the MoMA exhibition points out, Duchamp also did so as a conceptual strategy to devalue the original and call into question what counts as a copy.

The works in the exhibition also include the 1964 version bike path (bicycle wheel)is his 1913 readymade, consisting of a bicycle wheel placed on a wooden bench. According to Gagosian, this readymade is the only version bicycle wheels Not hosted by the museum.

A Gagosian spokesman declined to comment on whether the show was for sale, and the gallery’s announcement did not specify whether the items included were on loan. (Gagosian regularly hosts historical art exhibitions that include loans, and its press releases usually indicate when the gallery borrows works from the institution.)

Duchamp’s works are highly sought after in the market due to his importance in art history and the limited number of works available for purchase. Few of the 300 readymades on display at MoMA belong to private collectors.

On the rare occasions that Duchamp’s works do come to market, they fetch large sums of money. In 2009, Christie’s auction house set his auction record Belle Haleine – Eau De Voilette (Beautiful Breath – Veil Water)is a 1921 sculpture in which a perfume bottle bears a label referring to Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy. The piece, originally owned by designer Yves Saint Laurent and his former partner Pierre Bergé, sold at the Paris branch of the auction house for $11.5 million, six times its estimate.

His “Boîte-en-valise” works – small suitcases filled with miniature versions of his readymades and paintings – also regularly come to auction, selling for as low as seven figures.

This is the first Duchamp solo exhibition held by Gagosian, one of the world’s largest galleries, since 2014. The exhibition is also held at 980 Madison Avenue.

Gagosian first opened an office in the building in 1987 and went on to lease units on multiple floors as gallery space. 2023, Art Network News Gagosian and other galleries in the building were evicted from the building after the building’s management turned over much of the property to Bloomberg Philanthropies, the report said. The final exhibition at the original site is a critically acclaimed retrospective of Jasper Johns’s cross-hatch paintings, which will be on view until April 24.