Marcel Broodthaers 30

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 30, 2026. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in)

This painting brings together two historically and visually distant references within a single improbable scene: the photographic portrait of Marcel Broodthaers and the harlequin figure associated with Picasso’s Rose Period. Rather than reproducing either source literally, the work displaces them into a pictorial space in which identity, representation, and citation emerge as unstable constructions.

The central figure, upright and without defined features, appears less as a portrait than as a staged presence. Its diamond-patterned costume invokes a modern tradition shaped by ambiguity, artifice, and theatricality. Beside it, a small child’s piano heightens the scene’s estranged quality, introducing a domestic element that unsettles any fixed or narrative reading.

The background, developed from remembered coastal landscapes in Brazil, unfolds through ochres, yellows, and earth tones, replacing the darkness of Section Cinéma, part of Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, with a warmer, more open, and unstable atmosphere. In doing so, the painting shifts a reference rooted in exhibition display into a field of memory and fiction.

Situated within The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to a lineage of artists who conceived their own museums and galleries as critical frameworks and symbolic structures, among them Marcel Duchamp with Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou with Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers with Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. From this perspective, painting is affirmed not only as image, but also as a space of display in itself.