Talia Kwartler // Suzanne Duchamp at the Kunsthaus Zürich
Suzanne Duchamp (June–September 2025), co-organized with Cathérine Hug at the Kunsthaus Zürich, will be the first-ever posthumous retrospective dedicated to Suzanne Duchamp’s innovative body of work. Duchamp is most well-known for her involvement with Dada in Paris, yet she made work across a variety of artistic modes during her fifty-year career. The exhibition centers her and offers a view onto what came before and after her association with Dada when she probed the spaces between pictorial and material realms. While the family name Duchamp is most commonly associated with Marcel Duchamp, the entire Duchamp family of artists, which included Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, has been studied less often. The exhibition will reorient our perspective on Suzanne Duchamp, her family, and her collaborators. In doing so, we can learn far more about her place within Dada and also reflect on the position of women artists within the avant-garde.
The exhibition explores Duchamp’s distinct way of combining modern elements with traditional media while she was affiliated with Dada, situating her within dialogues on the readymade taking place between New York, Zurich, and Paris during the 1910s and 1920s. These exchanges involved a transatlantic group of artists, especially her husband Jean Crotti, her older brother Marcel Duchamp, and her friend Francis Picabia. The exhibition highlights the period Duchamp was working within the Dada group, which is introduced by her Cubist explorations, and followed by the various modes of figuration and abstraction she cycled through in the second half of her career. The groupings of works shown emphasize various aspects of Duchamp’s art, such as the relationship between painting and the readymade, language and collage, dance and diagrams, poetry and printed journals, and abstraction and figuration. Placing Duchamp at the center of the narrative shifts the playing field for her and for her peers, including Marcel Duchamp, Crotti, and Picabia; it can also present a new model for how we can best exhibit avant-garde women artists, such as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Beatrice Wood.
[Caption: Suzanne Duchamp, Radiation de deux seuls éloignés (Radiation of Two Solitary Separates Apart), 1916–1920, Oil, gold paint, string, wax, plastic, glass beads, and tinfoil on canvas, 73.1 x 50 cm, Private collection.]