Robert Filliou 14

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 14, 2017. Oil on linen, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in).

Inspired by a photograph of Robert Filliou presenting his Galerie légitime during the Festival of Misfits in London in 1962, this painting revisits a foundational image of portable and self-defined exhibition making. The portrait approaches Filliou not only as an artist, but as a figure through whom the museum itself becomes mobile, provisional, and conceptually open.

Rather than preserving the source image as a stable document, the painting transforms it into a more reduced and atmospheric pictorial field. The figure remains visible, yet partially withheld, allowing the image to operate through suggestion, structural clarity, and visual restraint.

That reduction gives the work its particular tension. The portrait feels at once historical and unstable, holding together the specificity of an archival moment and the looseness of an image filtered through memory and painterly mediation.

Part of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to the only section of the museum in which artworks are available for acquisition. Within this broader framework, it extends a lineage shaped by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, where the museum itself becomes an artistic medium.