On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board

On the Subject of the Ready-Made or Using a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board
Works from the Daimler Art Collection selected by Bethan Huws on the occasion of 100 years of the Ready-Made

Daimler Contemporary
Haus Huth
Alte Potsdamer Straße 5
10785 Berlin
Germany

art.daimler.com
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For the exhibition On the Subject of the Ready-Made the Welsh conceptual artist Bethan Huws has devised a location specific curatorial project featuring 130 works from the Daimler Art Collection. The exhibition’s title references Marcel Duchamp’s play on words from the famous dictum of Lautréamont: "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (1874). A defining slogan of the Surrealists, it also anticipated the ready-made in linguistic form, and further relays Huws’ conceptual and curatorial impetus: the combinatorial thinking, inherent logic and the analytical wealth of allusions found in Duchamp’s innovative artistic approach.

Huws understands the ready-made not as a mass-produced, prefabricated everyday object removed from its original environment and situated within the context of art, as Duchamp first conceived it 100 years ago. For Huws, the ready-made is rather a translation of objects, images, and other elements into units of signification that are dislocated from their cultural and historical contexts in order to provoke new readings of their given meanings. The curation of ideas, themes, and constellations in the exhibition On the Subject of the Ready-Made therefore represents these aspects through the visual arrangement and juxtaposition of the Collection’s artworks spanning one hundred years of art history.

Texts written by Bethan Huws for the exhibition are available in both German and English.

Artists:
Max Ackermann (Germany), Josef Albers (Germany), Ian Anüll (Switzerland), John M Armleder (Switzerland), Hans/Jean Arp (France), Richard Artschwager (Switzerland), Willi Baumeister (Germany), Bill Beckley (USA), Max Bill (Switzerland), Julius Heinrich Bissier (Germany), Dieter Blum (Germany), Hartmut Böhm (Germany), Greg Bogin (USA), Monika Brandmeier (Germany), Andreas Brandt (Germany), Sarah Browne (Ireland), Max Burchartz (Germany), Daniel Buren (France), André Cadere (Poland), Siegfried Cremer (Germany), Gia Edzgveradze (GE), Sergio Fermariello (Italy), Roland Fischer (Germany), Adolf Fleischmann (Germany), Günter Fruhtrunk (Germany), Poul Gernes (Denmark), Hermann Glöckner (Germany), David Goldblatt (South Africa), Camille Graeser (Switzerland), Konstantin Grcic (Germany), George Grosz (Germany), Isabell Heimerdinger (Germany), Jan Henderikse (Netherlands), Adolf Hölzel (Germany), Johannes Itten (Germany), Donald Judd (USA), Franklin Prince Knott (USA), Tadaaki Kuwayama (Japan), Liu Zheng (China), Robert Mapplethorpe (USA), John McLaughlin (USA), Albert Mertz (Denmark), Gerold Miller (Germany), Olivier Mosset (Switzerland), Horst Münch (Germany), John Nixon (USA), Patrick Fabian Panetta (Germany), Esteban Pastorino (Argentina), Lothar Quinte (Germany), Timm Rautert (Germany), Joseph Francis Charles Rock (Austria), Peter Roehr (Germany), Ulrike Rosenbach (Germany), Tom Sachs (USA), Kiyoshi Sakamoto (Japan), Pietro Sanguineti (Germany), Viviane Sassen (Netherlands), Jürgen Schadeberg (Germany), Andreas Schmid (Germany), Leonhard Schmidt (Germany), Jan J. Schoonhoven (Netherlands), Dayanita Singh (India), Anton Stankowski (Germany), Elaine Sturtevant (USA), Guy Tillim (South Africa), Hayley Tompkins (UK), Rosemarie Trockel (Germany), Timm Ulrichs (Germany), Dieter Villinger (Germany), Andy Warhol (USA), Franz West (Austria), Christa Winter (Germany), Zheng Guogu (China), Heimo Zobernig (Austria)