Davis Museum at Wellesley College 1

Davis Lisboa, Davis Museum at Wellesley College 1, 2012, oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in)

Taking the façade of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College as its point of departure, this painting approaches architecture as both image and structure. The building is rendered with clarity and restraint, functioning less as a fixed subject than as a reflective surface through which the work articulates its own institutional logic.

Within this framework, the museum becomes a conceptual echo of Davis Museum Barcelona—conceived as a readymade in the form of a ballot box, a digital archive, and a recognized cultural entity. The painting operates in this expanded field, where representation and institutional form converge without hierarchy.

The work is part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, a corpus structured between portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers, and still lifes dedicated to their emblematic works: Boîte-en-valise, Galerie légitime, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. These references remain embedded rather than declared, informing the work’s internal coherence.

Executed in oil on linen, the square format establishes a measured dialogue with the geometry of the depicted façade. The composition is precise and balanced, reinforcing a sense of continuity between image, object, and the institutional framework it both reflects and reconfigures.