Marcel Duchamp #10

Derived from a still of Marcel Duchamp’s only live television interview, Marcel Duchamp #10 extends Davis Lisboa’s sustained engagement with image, authorship, and the afterlife of modernity. Through a restrained pictorial treatment, the work moves beyond portraiture toward a more unstable and resonant field shaped by memory, mediation, and presence.

Private Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

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€800

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Product Details

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Duchamp #10, 2017. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 × 3 cm (15.75 × 15.75 × 1.38 in).

This work forms part of Davis Lisboa’s ongoing engagement with the figure of Marcel Duchamp. Derived from a still of the only live television interview Duchamp ever gave—broadcast by the BBC in 1968, shortly before his death—the painting takes a familiar image as its point of departure while displacing it from its original context.

The image is approached not as a document, but as a construction. Embedded within it are key positions that shaped Duchamp’s thinking: a critique of “retinal” art, a refusal of the artist as a heroic figure, and an insistence on the continuity between artistic practice and everyday life.

A restrained, softened treatment introduces a measured instability that unsettles the clarity of the portrait. The work moves away from likeness toward a more open register, where the image operates through memory, mediation, and projection.

Within Lisboa’s practice, the painting maintains a sustained relation between image, archive, and institution. Marcel Duchamp #10 ultimately functions as a precise and self-contained reflection on authorship, the circulation of images, and the enduring critical space opened by modernity.

Private Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.