Dada’s Boys
Identity and Play in Contemporary Art
Curated by David Hopkins
Exhibition 27 May – 16 July 2006

Knut Åsdam, Matthew Barney, John Bock, Roderick Buchanan, Marcel Duchamp, Angus Fairhurst / Damien Hirst, Keith Farquhar, Douglas Gordon, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, Man Ray, Paul McCarthy, Lee Miller, Francis Picabia, Richard Prince

David Hopkins’s Dada’s Boys used a new idea about the dada work of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray as the basis for an examination of recent art. It re-animates the historical facts of dada with a vision of artistic camaraderie, in-jokes and affectionate competition, played out in sequences of interrelated works of art, and makes a case for dada as a kind of patriarch of twentieth century art, albeit an ironic and paradoxical one. Dada is more usually associated with nihilism and anti-art yet, acknowledging its extraordinarily powerful influence (where would art be now without Duchamp?), Dada’s Boys stresses that the attitude of negation for which dada is well known goes hand in hand with a determination to produce a new kind of art, and asks whether it might be possible for dada, or at least the part of it represented here, to have given rise to a lineage of artists, mostly male, whose art is concerned with developing anarchic but
probing explorations of identity.

New commission supported by The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

Downloads:
• Exhibition guide

Available from the bookshop:
• Publication
• Limited edition print: Keith Farquhar
• DVD 12 mins
• Poster, postcards