On September 25, 2025, the opening of the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition will take place at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Nine months in advance, the selection committee revealed its four nominated artists in order to represent the French scene in the world.
“All in all, the artist is not alone in carrying out the act of creation because the spectator establishes the contact of the work with the outside world by deciphering and interpreting its deep qualifications and thereby adds his own contribution to the process creative.” As part of his speech to the American Federation of Arts in Houston in April 1957, Marcel Duchamp defined the relationship between a work and its recipients, located well beyond their retina, actively struggling against what he calls the “retinal thrill”.
Here we are 57 years after the death of the unclassifiable artist, the day after the announcement of the four finalists for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, an innovative distinction in his honor, which, since its creation in 2000, encourages a unique panorama of contemporary art in France. But also, a reward of 90,000 euros in partnership with the Center Pompidou, representing prestigious visibility for the most innovative artists of their generation. Zoom on the four talents selected for the 2025 editionwhose work goes beyond the boundaries of the retina.
Vitality at the service of contemporary art
They are between 39 and 50 years old, from China to South Africa via France and Paris, where they all found their place of work. Visual art chemist, Bianca Bondi mainly bases her work on the symbolic mutation of bodies confronted with salt water. An artistic practice that closely echoes the text Duchamp du signe by Marcel Duchamp, in which he declares “Rrose Sélavy knows the salt merchant well.”alluding to his heteronymous spelling alter ego. In large spaces, Bianca Bondi explores life cycles by elevating mundane objectstrue poetic science.
The artist is named alongside her colleague Eva Nielsen. A fan of printed images and painting, she travels through landscapes to assemble, from concrete structures to isolated cabins against the backdrop of abandoned beaches. For his part, Xie Lei takes as his subject the facets of his imagination, an extension of his sensitivity expressed with brushstrokes, for vibrant and melancholy canvases. Finally, the artist Lionel Sabaté completes the selection. Multidisciplinary, it evokes nature in its most abstract formfrom dust to oxidation, from painting to sculpture and photography, manifest of the living.
The winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize will be revealed on September 25, 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
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