For it is not possible to step twice into the same river, according to Heraclitus, nor to touch mortal substance twice in any condition: by the swiftness and speed of its change, it scatters and collects itself again—or rather, it is not again and later but simultaneously that comes together and departs, approaches and retires.
—Plutarch
Gagosian is pleased to present Retrospective, including works by Chris Burden, Marcel Duchamp, Tom Friedman, Piero Golia, Douglas Gordon, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Piotr Uklański, and Andy Warhol. The retrospective exhibition, conceived and realized by a museum institution, is perceived as a watershed in any artist’s career. This exhibition looks at various ways in which contemporary artists mine their own histories to create their own defining moments—the retrospective gesture as a means of creating a perpetual present, as a process of physical recollection, as a strategy of circulation, or as a pure conceit.
The exhibition begins with a famous twentieth-century example, Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise. Between 1935 and 1941, Duchamp created an edition of twenty boxes, each in a brown leather carrying case containing a myriad of miniature works of art, each with slight variations in design and content. Duchamp was already thinking about producing a box containing his works—or rather, texts and a few sketches—in the 1910s. These early musings led to the edition La Boîte verte (The Green Box) in 1934. Following this, he started planning another box containing all the works he had created since the beginning of his career, from Nude Descending a Staircase, Chocolate Grinder, and Nine Malic Moulds to three-dimensional replicas of sculptures and readymades, including the notorious Fountain. The painting reproductions were black-and-white photographs that he hand-colored, thereby creating “new originals,” which he then certified. Following his invention of the readymade, Boite-en-valise further underscores the interdependence of object and context so central to Duchamp’s circular definition of the work of art.
