Marcel Broodthaers 16

This painting draws its conceptual foundation from a black-and-white photograph of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, taken during the presentation of the “Section Cinéma,” the seventh installment of his fictional museum project, the “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles.” This section was developed between 1971 and 1972 in the basement of a former wine cellar located at Burgplatz 12 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Despite its modest appearance, the space functioned simultaneously as an archive, screening room, production studio, and gathering place. More than a utilitarian venue, it operated as a threshold between the construction and dismantling of the museum—between institutional structure and its critical parody.

The photograph of Broodthaers standing beside a small children’s piano served as the conceptual departure point for this painting. The work interprets the tension between the performative and the documentary through a restrained visual language inspired by Romanesque frescoes. Frontal composition, formal simplification, tactile roughness, and chromatic austerity evoke a visual tradition in which form was subordinated to symbolic content.

The painting belongs to “The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona,” the only segment of this miniature museum dedicated to the sale of artworks. Symbolically founded within a ballot box and disseminated primarily via social media, the “Davis Museum Barcelona” aligns itself with a lineage of artist-initiated museums that function as poetic and political gestures. This lineage includes Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise,” Robert Filliou’s “Galerie Légitime,” and, crucially, Broodthaers’ own “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles.” Within this tradition, the Davis Museum operates as an expanded ready-made: a digital archive, a portable collection, and a non-profit collective art project officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.