“The Dadaist and painter Suzanne Duchamp, sister of Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, was at the forefront of her time and left a lasting impact on art history. For the first time worldwide, Suzanne Duchamp's work is being presented in a comprehensive retrospective, showcasing all its facets – from her early abstract compositions and Dadaist experiments to the figurative works of her later years.

Irony with a sense of the unexpected

Suzanne Duchamp (1889, Blainville-Crevon – 1963, Neuilly-sur-Seine) moved at the intersection of painting and wordplay with her art. Her works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, often accompanied by enigmatic titles that evoke new associations. Her friend Katherine S. Dreier described her as a ‘semi-abstract painter’ – an apt characterisation for a body of work that defies art-historical conventions. As part of the Parisian avant-garde, Duchamp explored Cubist fragments of urban landscapes and interiors in her early works before turning to Dadaism. Her pieces merge painting with poetry and experiment with various media and materials. While her painting evolved increasingly towards abstraction in the 1910s, she always maintained visual reference points. In 1922, for reasons unknown, she made an unexpected break with Dada and shifted towards figurative painting, often infused with ironic undertones.”- Kunsthaus Zürich