Paris: the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition will not take place at the Center Pompidou

The atmosphere was joyful and friendly at Artcurial this Thursday, January 9, the date of the announcement of the 2025 nominees for the Marcel Duchamp Prize (endowed with 90,000 euros). Claude Bonnin, president of Adiaf, an association of French collectors who launched this prize in 2000, first recalled how it works: each year, a selection committee made up of eleven collectors identifies “nominable” artists, by around thirty workshop visits and meetings, a non-exhaustive list is then sent to the members, who establish the names of potential candidates, before a second vote and a final deliberation. This year, the winning artists are Bianca Bondi, Xie Lei, Eva Nielsen and Lionel Sabatté.

5 years at the Paris Museum of Modern Art

« The Marcel Duchamp Prize is indeed the backbone of our association, he recalls. It is also very engaging for artists, who then join a form of club, taking part in the events and exhibitions that we organize the rest of the year, particularly abroad. » For these 25 years, the prize, exhibited at the Center Pompidou for 24 years, will finally take up residence at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, given the closure of the Beaubourg site for renovation. Fabrice Hergott, director of MAM Paris, said “ very impatient to discover high quality, surprising and strong works ».

« The Marcel Duchamp Prize will allow us to better integrate French artists into our programming, which is quite exploratory and open in its trends, he explains. I find it interesting to articulate it in relation to our spaces “. The exhibition of the winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize will therefore take place at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris for the next five editions (2025 to 2029). The first will be held from September 26 to February 22, 2026 with curators Jean-Pierre Criqui, curator of contemporary collections at the National Museum of Modern Art, and Julia Garimorth, chief curator and head of contemporary collections at the Art Museum. modern Paris.

The 4 winners of the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize

• Born in 1986 in Johannesburg, Bianca Bondi (represented by the Mor Charpentier gallery) has lived for many years in France where she stood out for her attention to ecofeminism and has already been presented in several biennials. She works a lot with the memory of places which she redeploys in installations of various sizes.

• Xie Lei (represented by the Sémiose gallery) was born in China in 1983. He revisits classic painting techniques, to show paintings with unreal and timeless universes, in which he reveals gentle references to the history of art and discreet sensual touches.

• Born in 1983 in France, Eva Nielsen (represented by the Peter Kilchmann and The Pill galleries) creates a painting that uses supports such as latex, leather, silk or screen printing and immerses its viewer in large utopian or dystopian landscapes. … She also plays with boundaries with the medium of photography.

• When Lionel Sabatté (represented by the Ceysson & Bénétière gallery), born in 1975 in France, likes to insert himself into the interstices between painting, drawing or sculpture. Passionate about experimentation, he stages different materials exalting the traces of experience, such as dust, ashes or tree stumps, and watches his copper powders evolve, in a global theme on nature and animals.

Very diverse, as is often the case, the backgrounds and practices of these four visual artists will give rise to fascinating debates, until October 23, 2025, the date of the announcement of the winner on the eve of Art Basel. From April 8 to August 24, 2025, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest presents an exhibition of around fifteen artists nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize.
Interview with Gaëlle Choisne, winner of the 2024 Marcel Duchamp Prize