Marcel Broodthaers 25 (Four Commas)

This painting is based on a documentary photograph in which Marcel Broodthaers appears seated on a folding chair during the presentation of Section Cinéma, part of Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, in Düsseldorf between 1971 and 1972. In this reinterpretation, the artist wears Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime on his head, the “gallery-hat” conceived in 1962 as a portable exhibition space intended to exist outside traditional institutional structures.

Rather than literally reproducing the original image, the painting transforms the scene into a fragmented composition in which figure and object merge into a single visual structure. Through this layering of images and historical references, the work creates a space where different moments, contexts, and exhibition models from the history of art coexist within the same image.

The piece belongs to The Paintings Section of Davis Museum Barcelona, the pictorial section of a conceptual museum project founded in 2009. Conceived as a hybrid structure between mini museum, digital archive, and collective artwork, the Davis Museum continues a lineage of artists who understood the exhibition space as an artistic medium, including Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Légitime by Robert Filliou, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles by Marcel Broodthaers.