Boîte-hors-de-valise 18
A 2026 oil painting bringing Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise into dialogue with Filliou’s Galerie légitime as portable models of the museum.
€270
Product Details
Davis Lisboa, Boîte-hors-de-valise 18, 2026, oil on linen, 20 × 20 × 3.5 cm (7.87 × 7.87 × 1.38 in).
Boîte-hors-de-valise 18 emerges from a dialogue between two historical models of the portable museum: Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime. Filliou’s folded-paper hat hovers above Duchamp’s closed suitcase, bringing into relation two seminal strategies of institutional critique.
The work invites the museum to be reconsidered not as stable architecture but as a mobile dispositif. A dark brown background and pale yellow ground establish an austere pictorial space, while the suspended hat introduces a Surrealist ambiguity reminiscent of René Magritte. Its tip extends beyond the upper edge of the canvas, suggesting that the Galerie légitime has already begun to lift off like a rocket: the painting arrests the instant before its disappearance into space.
Oil painting translates these conceptual gestures into the historical language of the medium. As part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work transforms this imagined encounter between Duchamp and Filliou into a reflection on archive, authorship, and self-institutionalization, in which the museum can be constructed, transported, and ultimately escape its own boundaries.
