Marcel Duchamp 20

This painting is part of the «The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona» and reinterprets Julian Wasser’s 1963 photograph, «Duchamp Smoking in Front of Fountain,» taken during Duchamp’s retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. In this version, Duchamp no longer smokes; instead, he hides his face beneath Robert Filliou’s «Galerie Légitime»—a paper hat created between 1962 and 1963 as both nomadic gallery and poetic gesture. The act suggests a reversal of authorship: the artist withdraws, becoming a site of critique and symbolic resistance.

These works engage a lineage of artists who created their own museums as conceptual gestures—Duchamp with the «Boîte-en-valise,» Filliou with the «Galerie Légitime,» and Broodthaers with the «Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles.» The «Davis Museum Barcelona» follows this tradition as a ready-made institution founded in a ballot box, shared through social media, and structured as a small-format collection, digital archive, nonprofit collective project, and cultural entity recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Within this context, «The Paintings Section» includes series on Animals, Self-Portraits, Interiors, Exteriors, Classical Mythology, Still Lifes, Historical Paintings, and Portraits. All works are painted in oil on linen using Old Holland paints and Talens mediums. The square format echoes the museum’s cubic architecture. This piece belongs to the «Full Color Period,» initiated in 2019 and marked by its vibrant chromatic intensity.