On the Subject of the Ready-Made

For the exhibition ‘On the Subject of the Ready-Made’ Bethan Huws has devised a location specific project, selecting examples of artwork from the Daimler Art Collection. Bethan Huws’ curatorial concept starts with Duchamp’s praxis of a combinatorial thinking, the inherent logic and the analytical wealth of allusions found in Duchamp’s conceptual approach. She represents these aspects through the visual neighborhood of artworks from one hundred years of art history, surprisingly juxtaposed so that they provide a commentary on one another. The exhibition’s title is a play-on-words on the famous dictum of Lautréamont: ‘As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ (1874), which became a defining slogan of the Surrealists, and also anticipated the ready-made in linguistic form.