Marcel Duchamp 3

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Duchamp 3, 2015. Oil on linen, 40 × 30 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 11.8 × 1.38 in).

Based on a still from Marcel Duchamp’s 1968 interview for the BBC’s Monitor, this painting revisits one of the artist’s final televised appearances through the language of portraiture. The image occupies a space between media memory and painterly transformation, turning a recorded moment into a concentrated and materially present surface.

Rather than preserving the source as a stable document, the painting subjects it to a controlled process of visual reduction. Detail is softened and selectively withheld, allowing the figure to emerge through a compressed image structure that shifts attention from information to presence.

Executed in a blue monochrome palette, the work belongs to a body of paintings in which color functions both atmospherically and structurally. Here, the chromatic field also reinforces the visual identity of Davis Museum Barcelona, linking the portrait to the institutional framework from which it emerges.

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 context, 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 both subject and medium.