Already Made? — Exposition de groupe — Jérôme de Noirmont Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 4 → March 24, 2011

In 1913, Marcel Duchamp came up with the artistic concept of ready-made, defining it as an “ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist”. The original attitude — which still governs the definition of what is strictly considered to be ready-made today — consists of choosing a manufactured object and designating it as a work of art.

This approach, which Marcel Duchamp himself developed further in order to produce “aided ready-made” works which involve only minimal intervention on the part of the artist, or “reciprocal ready-made” works which underline the fundamental antinomy between art and the ready-made concept, is an underlying factor in the way many modern artists work, whether or not they admit to its influence, and has made a wide-ranging contribution to the essentially conceptual nature of many contemporary works.

The Already-Made? precisely highlights the scale and diversity of this contemporary grasping of the ready-made concept, whether involving the assembly of found objects, using objects for purposes other than those for which they were designed or a conception focussing on the object’s symbolic and metaphorical value…

The selection draws solely upon contemporary works owned by the gallery from artists who use the object as a piece of ready-made art on a recurring or one-off basis. Thus the exhibition revolves around both important past works and others which are new and previously unseen by artists represented by the gallery.