Marcel Broodthaers 11
A blurred portrait of Marcel Broodthaers, derived from a 1970 photograph, in which fluid washes destabilize the image and suspend identity within the act of painting.
Through a rigorous visual economy, the work engages a lineage of artists—Duchamp, Filliou, and Broodthaers—who conceived the museum as an artistic structure in itself. The square format introduces a logic of containment, aligning the painting with the conceptual architecture of the Davis Museum.
Original · Signed · Certificate
€800
Product Details
Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 11, 2020. Oil on linen, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in).
Based on a photograph taken by Maria Gilissen—Marcel Broodthaers’ wife—in 1970 at the Zeeuws Museum, the work condenses a previously wider scene into a close-up, focusing on the artist at the moment he symbolically reconfigures the museum’s display cases within his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. The image operates simultaneously as document and painterly reconstruction.
The figure emerges from a blue surface, blurred and unstable, built through layers of paint applied with a lightness approaching watercolor. These veils soften contours and position the image between appearance and disappearance, shifting representation into a suspended state.
The work situates itself within a narrative of artists who created their own museums as a form of practice: from Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise to Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime, and Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. This lineage is reactivated here through a restrained visual language grounded in reduction and precision.
Executed in oil on linen, the square format introduces a logic of containment. As part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum, the work engages a broader system in which portrait and object converge within a shared institutional structure.
Additional information
| Weight | 2.5 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm |
