Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles #2 (Paintings)

Davis Lisboa, Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles #2 (Paintings), 2012. Oil on canvas, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm | 11.81 × 11.81 × 1.38 in.

Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles #2 (Paintings) takes the eagle as a visual and institutional emblem within the universe of Marcel Broodthaers. The work establishes a direct dialogue with Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles and, more specifically, with the exhibition Section des Figures: Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute, presented at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1972. In that context, Broodthaers incorporated Gerhard Richter’s Adler, opening a line of relation between painting, appropriation, and institution that this work reactivates from a contemporary perspective.

Rather than simply reproducing a historical reference, the painting activates a critical continuity between image and exhibition structure. Its formal treatment enters into dialogue with Richter’s photographic paintings, in which found images are translated onto the painted surface through a logic of mediation, distance, and reconstruction. Here, the eagle appears as a clear and condensed figure, capable of operating simultaneously as motif, sign, and conceptual device.

The work belongs to The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, a project developed in continuity with a genealogy of artists who conceived the museum as an artistic form. In resonance with Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, the painting is situated within a broader reflection on collection, display, and institutional authorship.

Produced during the Grey Period (2012), the work adopts a grayscale palette that recalls the tradition of the photographic image and a visual economy shaped by archive, reproduction, and memory. Its square format further reinforces its relationship to the spatial logic of Davis Museum Barcelona, integrating the painting into a structure in which artwork, museum, and exhibition device remain closely intertwined.

The Yellowstone Club Collection, Big Sky, Montana, USA.