Pablo Echaurren's Duchampian Counterculture at Scala Contarini del Bovolo

The exhibition 'Du champ magnetique' at Scala Contarini del Bovolo in Venice, curated by Raffaella Perna and Kevin Repp, explores Pablo Echaurren's appropriation of Marcel Duchamp as a tool for anti-commercial, politically charged art. Echaurren (born Rome, 1951) reimagines Duchamp's readymades, such as renaming the bottle rack 'Scolabottiglie Molotov,' to inject disorder into conventional artistic language. The show is linked to a conference at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the Centre Pompidou and contextualizes Echaurren's work within the 1977 Italian counterculture movement, particularly the 'Indiani metropolitani' group. Echaurren co-founded the self-managed newspaper 'Oask?!' with Claudia Salaris, which blended Dadaist and Situationist irreverence to disrupt linguistic norms. The exhibition highlights Echaurren's use of Duchamp as a 'refrain'—a territorial assemblage that deterritorializes art from fetishism. Works like 'The Golden Bachelors' (2016) and 'Il ritardo della sposa' (2016) incorporate collages and ceramics, the latter produced at Bottega Gatti in Faenza. The show runs at Scala Contarini del Bovolo, a historic Venetian venue.