Self-portrait #2 (Space Oddity)

Davis Lisboa, Self-portrait #2 (Space Oddity), 2017. Oil on canvas, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm | 11.81 × 11.81 × 1.38 in.

Inspired by David Bowie’s Space Oddity, Self-portrait #2 (Space Oddity) explores a condition of existential estrangement through the genre of self-portraiture. The image originates in a digital selfie generated using a Facebook augmented reality filter, in which the artist appears wearing a virtual space helmet. Translated into oil on canvas, this mediated image takes on a quieter, more reflective register, where presence and distance remain suspended.

The work brings together a reference drawn from popular culture with a restrained painterly logic. Its softened treatment of the image recalls a tradition in which painting does not confirm visibility so much as test its instability, allowing the subject to appear as something provisional, filtered, and slightly inaccessible. Rather than asserting identity, the portrait presents it as a construction shaped by technological and visual mediation.

Within the composition, the helmet functions as more than an allusion to the space race or the imagery of science fiction. It also evokes Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, in which the exhibition space was displaced onto the artist’s own head. Here, that logic is reformulated through contemporary visual culture, proposing a portable and conceptual space defined by self-representation, fiction, and display.

The work belongs to The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, where painting is situated within a broader reflection on the museum as artistic form. In dialogue with the genealogy of museums founded by artists—from Duchamp and Boîte-en-valise to Filliou and Galerie légitime, and Broodthaers with Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles—the painting places portraiture, institutional structure, and digital image-making within a shared conceptual field. Its square format and dominant blue further reinforce its connection to the visual and spatial identity of the museum itself.

The Philip Henderson Collection, Atlanta, USA