Robert Filliou 31

Original oil painting on linen by Davis Lisboa. Inspired by a historical photograph of Robert Filliou wearing a hat associated with his Galerie légitime, a portable gallery conceived in 1962, this work reinterprets an image from the history of experimental exhibition practices through a bold and contemporary pictorial language.

Balancing figuration and abstraction, the composition combines structural precision with chromatic intensity, resulting in a visually striking and conceptually compelling image. Ideal for collectors interested in contemporary figurative painting with strong art-historical resonance.

Original · Signed · Certificate

€1,750

Product Details

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 31, 2023. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 cm.

The painting takes as its point of departure a black-and-white photograph of Robert Filliou wearing a hat associated with his Galerie légitime. Conceived in 1962, this portable gallery housed small works by Filliou and other artists, making the encounter between artwork and audience possible beyond a fixed exhibition space.

The project’s temporal dimension emerged in The Frozen Exhibition, October 1962–October 1972, initiated during the Festival of Misfits in London. Its opening was conceived to extend over ten years. The 1972 edition gathered photographs and documents connected with the earlier presentation, while Defrosting the Frozen Exhibition, held at Galerie Philomène Magers in Bonn that year, marked a concrete moment in this extended exhibition history.

Lisboa’s painting brings this photographic record into the medium of oil painting. Within his declared engagement with Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, the portrait can be read as an inquiry into artists’ capacity to construct their own conditions of display and circulation.