Marcel Duchamp 20

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Duchamp 20, 2024, oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

This painting is based on the photograph Duchamp Smoking in Front of Fountain. Taken in 1963 during Marcel Duchamp’s retrospective in Pasadena, the image shows the artist smoking in front of a replica of Fountain. From this source, the painting introduces a direct substitution: the cigarette disappears and is replaced by Galerie Légitime, a folded paper hat conceived as a portable gallery in which exhibition is reduced to a minimal, immediate, and mobile gesture.

This shift reorganizes the image without altering its structure. The act of smoking—intimate and contingent—gives way to a device that repositions the artist as mediator. By covering his face with the Galerie Légitime, the figure does not withdraw but aligns itself with the logic of the device: the face is absorbed and re-situated within the work, suspending its representational function.

The work situates itself within a genealogy of practices that reconfigure the institutions of art—the museum and the gallery—as artistic form, in dialogue with Boîte-en-valise, Galerie Légitime, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Within this framework, the Davis Museum Barcelona operates simultaneously as context and device: a structure conceived as an institutional readymade, continuously activated through its circulation, digital archive, and ongoing reconfiguration as a collection.

Executed in oil on linen, the painting belongs to the Full Color Period, where chromatic intensity is balanced by a restrained composition. The square format echoes an architectural logic, while the scale situates the work within a system of accumulation, circulation, and sustained viewing.