MIAMI, FL.- Miami Art Museum presents Focus: Marcel Duchamp, a rare opportunity for Miami audiences to experience the seminal French artists work firsthand. The display presents Miami Art Museums edition of Duchamps Box in a Suitcase, from 1961, alongside a small trove of works hailing from the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. The exhibition will be on view at Miami Art Museum from Thursday, November 17, 2011 through Sunday, March 18, 2012.
Marcel Duchamp reoriented the way we understand the source of a given artworks meaning and value, said MAM Associate Curator René Morales. He questioned the barriers that separate art from everyday life, expanding our conceptions of what an artwork can be.
Box in a Suitcase was one of the first artworks purchased by MAM for its collection. Conceived in 1941 on the eve of Duchamps departure from Europe to the US, it serves as a portable, miniature retrospective of his own work. With a characteristic attitude of detached irony, the self-exiled artist thus cast himself in the role of traveling salesman, transporting revolutionary ideas rather than housewares not from door to door but from one continent to another. Surrounded by full-scale examples of Duchamps famous ready-mades as well as a rare early painting, Box in a Suitcase functions in this context as an exhibition within an exhibition.
Focus: Marcel Duchamp serves primarily as an introduction to the artists complex production. Additionally, it explores the subtle interventions that Duchamp brought to bear in the process of making reproductions of his earlier work, using it as an opportunity to layer the editions with fresh conceptual content. The exhibition is on view in the Focus Gallery section of MAMs Permanent Collection installation, a space dedicated to highlighting artists or themes considered cornerstones of MAMs collecting goals.
David Joselit, author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, will give a lecture on Duchamps work on February 18, 2012 at 2pm.