There is an exhibition on Marcel Duchamp in one of the most important galleries in Milan A dialogue between Marcel Duchamp and Sturtevant
By Amélie Bernard
A new exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Milan brings together two key figures in the transformation of twentieth-century artistic thought: Marcel Duchamp and Sturtevant . Titled Dialogues are Mostly Fried Snowballs , the show—open from March 17 to July 23, 2026, at Palazzo Belgioioso —offers a direct comparison between Duchamp's readymades and the American artist's celebrated repetitions.
The project focuses on a central issue in contemporary art: the relationship between original and reproduction . Duchamp had already destabilized this principle in the early decades of the twentieth century with his readymades, common objects removed from their everyday function and transformed into works of art through a gesture of choice. Sturtevant, starting in the 1960s, radicalized that gesture by manually repeating works by other artists—including Duchamp, Warhol, and Johns—to analyze their conceptual structure.
The exhibition's title draws on an ironic phrase by Sturtevant: "Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs." The image alludes to the paradoxical nature of the confrontation between two practices that, despite belonging to different eras, share the same desire to challenge traditional art categories.
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The exhibition creates a genuine confrontation between the works of the two artists. Duchamp's readymade Porte-bouteilles (1914/64) dominates the gallery's main space, while works such as Trébuchet (1917/64) transform the exhibition space into a potentially unstable environment for the viewer.
Alongside these works appear Sturtevant's repetitions of Fountain, the famous urinal designed by Duchamp in 1917, presented in various media: photography, drawing, collage, and sculpture. The focus of Sturtevant's research is not the object itself, but the system of discourses that transformed it into an icon of art history.
