Robert Filliou 26

Part of the portrait series within The Paintings Section of Davis Museum Barcelona, this work is based on a still from Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Part 2 (1979). Reduced to a precise formal economy, the painting balances document and construction through a restrained pictorial language.

Executed in 2022, it belongs to Lisboa’s Full Color Period (2019–present), with subtle formal affinities to Matisse, Hopper, and Richard Diebenkorn.

The Joe Smith Collection, New York, USA.

Original · Signed · Certificate

€1,750

SOLD

Product Details

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 26, 2022. Oil on linen, 50 × 50 × 3.5 cm (31.50 × 31.50 × 1.38 in).

This work forms part of a portrait series that constitutes one of the divisions of The Paintings Section of Davis Museum Barcelona, focused on a genealogy of artists who interweave painting, archival logic, and institutional invention: 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. The portrait of Filliou is reduced to an image of marked formal economy, where restraint sharpens its dual status as both document and constructed image.

Conceived by the artist as a museum, a collection, and a discursive framework, Davis Museum Barcelona extends a lineage of practices that repositioned the artwork within expanded authorship and forms of critical institutional production. Within this structure, each painting operates simultaneously as a self-contained image, an archival fragment, and a material extension of a fictional institution grounded in practice.

Robert Filliou 26 is based on a still from Filliou’s video Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Part 2 (1979), translated into painting through processes of selection, cropping, and reduction. The composition sustains a controlled tension between frontality, stillness, and atmosphere, with distant echoes of Henri Matisse and Edward Hopper, yet more closely aligned, in its chromatic and spatial articulation, with the sensibility of Richard Diebenkorn.

Executed in 2022, the work belongs to the Full Color Period (2019–present), in which Lisboa advances a more open, luminous, and chromatically assertive pictorial language. Oil on linen and the square format—recurring elements throughout his practice—reinforce the material coherence of a body of work in which image, archive, and institution remain inseparable.

The Joe Smith Collection, New York, USA.