The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona

The Paintings Section from the Davis Museum Barcelona constitutes the central axis of Davis Lisboa’s practice, conceived not as a discrete series of works but as a structured pictorial system embedded within an expanded museological framework. Painting here operates in conjunction with archive, document, and institution, forming a coherent and self-reflexive corpus.

Emerging from a sustained engagement with artist-led museum models, the project aligns itself with a lineage that includes the Museum of American Art in Berlin (MoAA), particularly in its ambition to construct a pictorial archive capable of registering cultural and historical transfer. Lisboa’s approach, however, shifts the emphasis from historiographic reconstruction to the critical staging of the museum as both subject and medium.

Formally, the works enter into a precise dialogue with Gerhard Richter’s procedures of photographic translation, projection, and painterly dissolution. Yet this engagement exceeds citation. The photographic image becomes an operative device through which painting is reconfigured as a site of temporal dislocation—where memory, mediation, and interpretation converge.

At the core of the section lies a specific art-historical narrative: that of artists who produced their own institutional frameworks. Figures such as Marcel Duchamp with his Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou with his Galerie Légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers with his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles are not merely referenced but structurally embedded within the conceptual architecture of the project. Each painting functions simultaneously as representation and as museological fragment—at once image, document, and institutional extension.

This body of work is integrated into the Davis Museum Barcelona, a project materialized within a ballot box and disseminated through digital networks. Positioned between object, archive, and institutional critique, the museum operates as a readymade structure, a decentralized collection, and is officially recognized as a cultural entity by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The inclusion of these works in the archive of Bridgeman Images extends their circulation beyond the physical object, situating them within a global system of image distribution and licensing. In this context, the paintings acquire a dual status: singular works and reproducible visual documents.

The section is organized into eight categories—Animals, Self-Portraits, Exteriors, Interiors, Classical Mythology, Still Lifes, Historical Paintings, and Portraits—establishing not only a taxonomic order but a conceptual framework through which the collection is read as a unified visual archive.

Lisboa’s commitment to oil on linen reflects both a technical and historical position. The medium is engaged not as a neutral support but as a dense field of references, carrying forward the material and conceptual weight of Western painting. This is reinforced by the exclusive use of Old Holland pigments, underscoring a deliberate investment in durability and precision.

The predominance of the square format corresponds directly to the cubic logic of the museum itself, producing a formal equivalence between pictorial surface and institutional container.

Chromatically, the production unfolds across three distinct phases: the Grey Period (2011–2016), the Blue Period (2016–2018), and the Full-Color Period (2019–present). These are not merely stylistic shifts but structural recalibrations within the broader system of the work.

Taken together, the Paintings Section articulates a position in which painting is no longer confined to representation, but operates as a critical apparatus—simultaneously producing images and interrogating the conditions of their display, circulation, and institutional framing.