10 New York Gallery Shows Not to Miss During Frieze Week
- Gagosian, 980 Madison
- Through 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, which occupied its fifth-floor galleries for more than 40 years. Then came Michael Bloomberg. In 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies signed a massive lease for much of the building from landlord Aby Rosen‘s RFR Holding, effectively displacing several gallery tenants, including Gagosian. A year later, Bloomberg escalated the shift further by purchasing the entire building outright for roughly $560 million. Yet Gagosian ultimately 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 Duchamp, paired with a separate exhibition of early works by Robert Rauschenberg from the Cy Twombly Foundation. Timed to coincide with MoMA’s major Duchamp survey, the Gagosian exhibition centers on some of the artist’s most iconic readymades, which Duchamp eventually reproduced in editions after many of the originals had been lost and dealers increasingly pushed to establish a market around his work. The examples on view were produced with the assistance of Italian gallerist Arturo Schwarz and include replicas of seminal works such as Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel)—made in 1964, after the lost 1913 original, the only surviving example not currently held in a major institutional collection—alongside Fountain (1964, after the lost 1917 original), L.H.O.O.Q. (1964, after the 1919 original), Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Dryer) (1964, after the lost 1914 original) and Boîte-en-valise (1935-1949; contents 1935-1941). The fact that these readymades are themselves replicas only further complicates and subverts conventional ideas of artistic integrity, originality and authorship that Duchamp spent his career dismantling.
