Boîte-hors-de-valise 15

This painting pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-Valise”, a pivotal work in which the artist reimagined the museum as a portable and deeply personal retrospective. Conceived in 1935, Duchamp’s suitcase-museum gathered miniature replicas of his seminal pieces, positioning him simultaneously as curator and merchant of his own oeuvre. In this canvas, the “Boîte” is rendered sealed—opaque and inscrutable—as if safeguarding an intimate constellation of artistic memory. It does not emerge within a sanitized studio setting but rather in a coastal scene that evokes the Mediterranean: a liminal space where concealment and revelation entwine.

The work calls upon viewers to engage with a genealogy of artists who questioned institutional authority through the founding of their own symbolic museums. Duchamp, Filliou, and Broodthaers constructed poetic-political exhibition spaces that challenged the conventions of authorship, display, and collection. The “Davis Museum Barcelona” extends this conceptual legacy as a multifaceted readymade: a sculptural object, a digital archive, a nonprofit artistic initiative, a collection of small-format contemporary works, a miniature online museum, and an entity officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

“The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona” is the only division of the museum where works are available for sale. It includes still lifes portraying conceptual masterpieces such as “Boîte-en-valise”, “Galerie légitime”, and “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles”, alongside portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers. The choice of oil on linen, using Old Holland pigments and Talens mediums, signals a commitment to material excellence. The square format of the canvas echoes the museum’s cubic architecture. Chromatically, this work belongs to the “Full Color Period”, ongoing since 2019.