Marcel Broodthaers 27

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 27, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

This painting is based on a documentary photograph in which Marcel Broodthaers is portrayed during the presentation of Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Cinéma in Düsseldorf between 1971 and 1972.

The work transforms this historical image into a composition where memory, fiction, and a certain organic geometry coexist within the same scene. In this imagined portrait, Broodthaers wears Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime on his head, the portable gallery conceived in 1962 as a hat capable of turning any place into a provisional exhibition space. The composition recalls certain Cubist structures, causing the image to oscillate between figuration and abstraction. A warm palette of earth tones, beige, and soft greys gives the scene a quiet and subtly ironic atmosphere.

The painting belongs to The Paintings Section of Davis Museum Barcelona, the pictorial section of a conceptual museum project founded in 2009 by Davis Lisboa. Conceived as a hybrid structure between readymade sculpture, contemporary art mini museum, digital archive, and collective artwork, the Davis Museum continues a lineage of artists who used the museum itself as a work of art, including Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Légitime by Robert Filliou, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles by Marcel Broodthaers.

Executed in oil on linen, the work belongs to the artist’s Full Color Period. The square format subtly alludes to the cubic geometry of the Davis Museum, reinforcing the balance between historical reference and contemporary visual language.