Davis Cryogenic Museum 1

Davis Lisboa, Davis Cryogenic Museum 1, 2015. Oil on linen, 40 × 30 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 11.8 × 1.38 in).

Part of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, this work belongs to a body of paintings that reflects on the museum as both frame and artistic medium. Within that broader context, it extends a lineage shaped by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, where the self-founded museum becomes a site of conceptual and formal experimentation.

Executed in a monochrome blue register, the painting is built through loose brushwork and thin glazes that lend the surface a soft, atmospheric instability. The image appears suspended between visibility and dissolution, allowing the dome-like form to emerge gradually from the ground rather than assert itself as a fixed object.

That ambiguity is central to the work. The collapse of figure and background destabilizes the image and shifts attention toward the painting’s material presence, where surface, atmosphere, and structure remain in delicate tension.

Inspired by a photograph of a small wooden igloo painted blue and conceived as a “museum-igloo,” the work proposes the museum as a speculative refuge: intimate in scale, provisional in form, and conceptually open. Between sculpture and shelter, it imagines the collection not as a closed system, but as a portable and critical space.