Marcel Broodthaers 28

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 28, 2026. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

Drawing on three archival photographs connected to Marcel Broodthaers’s fictional museum, this painting brings together distinct episodes from his institutional practice into a single pictorial field. From the beach at De Haan to the Section Cinéma in Düsseldorf and the emblematic eagle of the Section des Figures, the work assembles fragments of exhibition, gesture, and display into a condensed visual structure.

Rather than treating these sources as documentary records, the painting reorganizes them through a compositional logic that transforms archive into image. The result is less a narrative sequence than a critical topography in which objects, symbols, and museological signs coexist within a tightly constructed field.

Its structure recalls the fractured organization of Picasso’s Three Musicians, not as quotation, but as a formal model for bringing multiple visual elements into dynamic relation. This layered composition allows the painting to function simultaneously as image, document, and museological fragment.

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 this broader framework, 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 museum itself becomes an artistic medium.