Robert Filliou 32

This work is part of «The Painting Section of the Davis Museum Barcelona», a miniature contemporary art museum symbolically founded in a ballot box in 2009. Conceived as an artwork in itself, the project reinterprets the museological strategies of artists such as Marcel Duchamp («Boîte-en-valise», 1935–41), Robert Filliou («Galerie légitime», 1962–1963), and Marcel Broodthaers («Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles», 1968–72), all of whom challenged the conventions of the traditional museum by merging art, archive, and institution into unprecedented conceptual frameworks.

The painting takes as its starting point an iconic black-and-white photograph of Robert Filliou, an artist associated with the Fluxus movement, in which he appears wearing his «Galerie légitime»: a portable, imaginary art gallery fashioned from a folded paper hat. The photograph was taken during the exhibition «Defrosting the Frozen Exhibition», held in London in 1962, and captures Filliou’s performative gesture of transforming his own body into a museum space—thereby questioning institutional mechanisms of artistic validation.

The preliminary studies for this painting were carried out using artificial intelligence, to which a Cubist style was applied to the original image. The final painting was then executed in oil on linen, using a vibrant color palette inspired by modern Latin American art, evoking the festive and luminous tones found in the works of Cândido Portinari and Alfredo Volpi.