Duchamp and Sturtevant: Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs The Exhibitions Not to Miss During Milan Art Week

By Elisa Carollo

Coinciding with the major retrospective of Duchamp’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac is staging an unprecedented intellectual and aesthetic dialogue between Marcel Duchamp and Elaine Sturtevant, who both interrogate the mechanisms of signification and value in art—Duchamp as a foundational figure and Sturtevant pushing that inquiry further through a more radical and provocative practice in the post-Duchampian context. The exhibition’s witty title, “Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs,” drawn from one of Sturtevant’s ironic remarks, resonates with Duchamp’s own disruptive use of humor to unsettle conventional relationships between symbol, language and meaning. Exploring key themes that run through Duchamp’s practice, from the kinetic to the erotic, the show reveals how his radical readymades find a critical counterpart in Sturtevant’s gesture of repetition. Rejecting the primacy of the visual, Sturtevant manually revisited and recreated works by her contemporaries in a paradoxical attempt to dematerialize them and access what she described as the “silent interior of art.” A central focus of the exhibition is her sustained engagement with iconic Duchamp readymades such as the Fountain or the Bottle Rack, presented through multiple iterations across photography, collage, drawing and sculpture. Under Sturtevant’s incisive gaze, Duchamp’s signed urinal becomes the site of an ongoing inquiry into its cult status, shifting attention from the object itself to the discourse that surrounds it, which ultimately becomes the true subject of her work.