ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents the late artist Marcel Broodthaers’s exhibition Décor: A Conquest. The exhibition will remain on view in the AAM’s Gallery 4 through Sunday, March 1, 2015.

Originally conceived in 1974, and first shown in 1975 as the inaugural exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Décor is an intricate installation that explores the relationship between conflict and comfort through two period rooms titled XIXth Century and XXth Century respectively. The two spaces feature a culmination of themes explored within the artist’s earlier “décors”—Broodthaers’s term for the presentations and installations of his work.

Décor was the last exhibition Broodthaers would present before his death, and represents his complex investigation into the function of both history and museology—juxtaposing implements of war and furniture to explore the relationship between weapons and objects as symbols of power.

As exhibition curator, AAM Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman states within her text for the show: “The exhibition is a significant reminder that if we fail to learn from history—political as well as art—we are certain to continue finding ourselves in similar circumstances. The questions that Broodthaers asked, and the societal abnormalities he highlighted, are eerily comparable to those that concern us today.”

Marcel Broodthaers (January 28, 1924–January 28, 1976) was born in Brussels, Belgium. He began his career as a poet, turning to the visual arts at the age of forty and continuing on this path until his death at age fifty-two. During this twelve-year period, Broodthaers created a vast body of work that explored the relationships between objects and language, history and identity that remains influential and relevant to contemporary artists working now.