With effortless provocation, Duchamp created works beyond the known genres. Art, to his mind, was to transcend the superficially visible. Duchamp turned everyday objects into art; playing chess became a form of mental drawing, and with Rose Sélavy he created his female alter ego.
The volume shows works from the Duchamp collection at Schwerin: caricatures that are groundbreaking for his handling of image and language; the cosmos of the "Big Glass", in which he constructed the view of an actually invisible, multi-dimensional world; graphics, objects and the notes related to the "Green Box", which give insight into the complexity of his intellectual world; readymades, whose bewildering titles inspire the viewer's imagination to see the impossible.
Selected works enter into a dialog with works by John Cage, Marcel Broothaers, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, AK Dolven, and Werner Reiterer, and make visible Duchamp's power, which continues to be inspiring to this day.
