Marcel Broodthaers 14

A psychologically charged portrait based on a 1969 photograph of Marcel Broodthaers taken during the filming of Un Voyage à Waterloo (Napoléon 1769–1969). Through blurred layers, dragged oil textures, and a restrained chromatic palette, Davis Lisboa transforms the historical image into a contemporary meditation on fiction, performance, and institutional identity. Part of The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona, the work reflects the museum’s hybrid condition as both conceptual project and collectible structure.

Original · Signed · Certificate

€920

Product Details

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 14, 2021. Oil on linen, 50 × 50 × 3.5 cm (19.7 × 19.7 × 1.38 in).

Part of The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona, this work belongs to the only section of the museum where artworks remain available for acquisition. The series unfolds within the conceptual structure of Davis Museum Barcelona, a portable mini museum conceived simultaneously as a digital archive, collective project, and cultural entity officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The painting is based on a 1969 photograph by Maria Gilissen depicting Marcel Broodthaers wearing a fake nose in front of an art transport truck during the filming of his experimental work Un Voyage à Waterloo (Napoléon 1769–1969). Davis Lisboa revisits this scene, charged with irony and theatricality, to construct a portrait in which fiction, representation, and institutional identity remain deliberately intertwined.

The composition combines a figurative structure with partially eroded areas produced through dragged layers of wet oil paint that coexist with translucent veils capable of destabilizing the image. These interruptions generate a vibrant surface in which the portrait appears to move constantly between appearance and disappearance. The blue background intensifies this visual tension while reinforcing the painting’s atmospheric quality.

Formally, the work incorporates subtle references to the chromatic language of British Pop Art, particularly a certain visual economy associated with David Hockney. Rather than representing a historical document, the painting shifts a photograph linked to Marcel Broodthaers into a pictorial space where memory, staging, and institutional construction remain inseparable.