Marcel Duchamp #4 (Paintings)

Inspired by a photograph of Marcel Duchamp alongside his “Bicycle Wheel” during the retrospective held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, this painting adopts the pictorial technique of Gerhard Richter, blurring projected images onto the canvas to challenge the clarity of the archive and the stability of the referent. The work belongs to “The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona,” the only section of the museum in which the artworks are available for sale. This miniature museum is simultaneously a readymade sculpture, a digital archive, and a cultural entity officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The painting section constructs a critical narrative around artists who created their own museums, such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise,” Robert Filliou’s “Galerie légitime,” and Marcel Broodthaers’s “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles.” The blue monochrome refers to the chromatic identity of the Davis Museum and reinforces the convergence between pictorial language and institutional fiction.

Executed in oil on linen with high-grade materials, the surface alternates between zones of opacity and calculated precision in brushwork. The square format echoes the cubic architecture of the museum and sustains its conceptual framework, transforming each painting into a historiographic gesture and a critical extension of art history.