TATE MODERN
21 February – 26 May 2008
This provocative exhibition presents three colossal 20th century artists who changed the course of art forever - Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptualism and creator of the “readymade”, Man Ray, the celebrated photographer and painter, and Francis Picabia, the French painter and poet.
Their meeting led to the creation of the Dada movement in New York during the First World War. These three pioneers of art remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives and shared a special artistic dialogue. At the heart of their friendship lay a shared outlook on life, which emerges in their works via jokes, a sense of irony, and a pronounced interest in eroticism.
Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores the affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others’ ideas and innovations.
The exhibition features over 400 works with key pieces such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No21) 1912 which created a furore when displayed in New York in 1913, his iconic Fountain 1917and the Mona Lisa parody L.H.O.O.Q 1919 alongside Man Ray’s distinctive rayographs, and Picabia’s later inspired paintings.There has been no major exhibition of this kind at Tate since the Duchamp show of 1966 and this is an unmissable opportunity to see the works that steered the course for contemporary art as we see it today.
