David Mickenberg 1

Davis Lisboa, David Mickenberg 1, 2012. Oil on canvas, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in).

This portrait of David Mickenberg, Director of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from 2001 to 2008, brings into focus a conceptual relationship between American university museums and Davis Museum Barcelona. The work positions portraiture as a site where institutional identity and painterly language converge.

Built from a photographic source and translated into oil through loose, energetic brushwork, the painting draws on the blurred visual logic associated with Gerhard Richter. The image remains intentionally unstable, holding the figure between recognition and dissolution while emphasizing the physical presence of the painted surface.

That tension between document and painterly interpretation gives the work much of its force. Rather than offering a fixed likeness, the portrait opens onto broader questions of visibility, memory, and the cultural frameworks through which images acquire meaning.

Part of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to the only section of the museum in which artworks are available for acquisition. Within the larger structure of Davis Museum Barcelona, it extends an ongoing reflection on the museum as artistic form, where portrait, collection, and institution become inseparable.