“Marcel Duchamp 14”

This painting is part of “The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona”, the only section of this mini museum in which works are offered for acquisition. It constructs a narrative within the history of contemporary art centered on artists who founded their own museums as acts of institutional critique. This lineage is articulated through Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers, and includes painterly reinterpretations of emblematic works such as “Boîte-en-valise,” “Galerie légitime,” and “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles.”

Conceptually, the work draws on a historical portrait of Marcel Duchamp with “Bicycle Wheel” (1951), shown at the Pasadena Art Museum retrospective in 1963. The image functions not as documentation but as a device for reflecting on the construction of the artist, the object, and their museological framing.

Formally, the painting engages with the legacy of Gerhard Richter’s photographic paintings of the 1960s. The use of blur and softened focus dissolves the motif’s identity, directing attention toward materiality, surface, and pictorial translation, and reinforcing the work’s post-conceptual and archival dimension.