- Gagosian980 Madison
- Until August 22, 2026
For decades, 980 Madison Avenue stood as one of the central anchors of New York’s blue-chip art world, crowned by Gagosian, who occupied its fifth-floor galleries for more than 40 years. Then it came Michael Bloomberg. In 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies signed a massive lease for most of the building from the owner To Rosen‘s RFR Holding, effectively displacing several gallery tenants, including Gagosian. A year later, Bloomberg escalated the change further by buying the entire building for about $560 million. Ultimately, though, Gagosian never left the historic address. Instead, the gallery has just unveiled a new 2,275-square-foot ground floor space designed by Caplan Colaku Architecture—the studio also behind the renovation of Gagosian’s Chelsea flagship and past projects for Gladstone and Gavin Brown’s enterprise—which opened with an extensive presentation dedicated to Marcel Duchampaccompanied by a special exhibition of early works by Robert Rauschenberg by the Cy Twombly Foundation. Time to coincide with MoMA’s major Duchamp surveythe Gagosian exhibition focuses on some of the artist’s most iconic dishes, which Duchamp eventually reproduced in editions as many of the originals were lost and dealers were increasingly pushed to create a market around his work. The examples on display were produced with the help of the Italian gallerist Arthur Black and include copies of important works such as Bicycle wheel—made in 1964, after the lost 1913 original, the only surviving example not currently held in a major institutional collection—together fountain (1964, after the lost original of 1917), LHOOQ (1964, after the 1919 original), Bottle dryer (1964, after the lost original of 1914) and box in the suitcase (1935-1949; contents 1935-1941). That these dishes are themselves copies only further complicates and subverts the conventional ideas of artistic integrity, originality, and authorship that Duchamp spent his career dismantling.
