Marcel Duchamp was one of the most revolutionary artists of the early twentieth century, when consumer culture was just beginning in Europe. After some years of painting, in 1913 Duchamp turned to experiments with mechanical drawing and notations, and began producing ‘readymades’. He took industrially produced everyday objects, removed them from their usage in daily life, from their cycle of production and consumption, and re-designated them as works of art. The Bicycle Wheel was the first of Duchamp’s readymades. The wheel is mounted upside-down upon a painted wooden stool, forming an iconic image of two functional items transformed into a non-functional art object. The implications of this gesture for artmaking were enormous, foregrounding surrealist assemblages and the gesture of selection as a creative act in itself, paving the way for the conceptual movements of the 1960s to today.

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