Marcel Broodthaers produces humorous yet heady art that levitates between post-Surrealism and Pop, with a touch of the conceptual. Shown here are five works produced between 1965 and 1973, including a drawing on a negative film and one of his famous mussels sculptures. Largely influenced by Duchamp or Magritte, Broodthaers wrote four ‘Theorems’ on the invitation for his 1968 show at Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp:
1. A mussel hides a mould and vice versa.
2. The pipe of Magritte is the mould of smoke. A factory is the antique mould of smoke.
3. Every object is a victim of its nature, even in a transparent painting the color codes the canvas, and the moulding, the frame.
4. An object is invisible when its form is perfect. Examples: the egg, the mussels, fries.
And by way of explanation for non-French speakers: la moule is a mussel, whereas le moule is a mold. Broodthaers loved employing mussels in his work as it is an animal that makes its own shell, its own mold (in British English: mould), so to speak, the perfect embodiment of self-determination.
