Musée des Aigles Modernes 21
A concise reading of Marcel Broodthaers’s “Section XIXe siècle” (1968), this painting translates a key moment of conceptual art into the material language of oil. The scene shifts from documentation toward a space of ambiguity, where domestic and exhibition contexts subtly converge.
Through a gently dreamlike atmosphere, the work restores depth, texture, and duration to the image, moving beyond its original function as a record. In dialogue with Boîte-en-valise (1935–1941) by Marcel Duchamp and Galerie Légitime (1962–1963) by Robert Filliou, it extends the idea of the museum as artistic form within the framework of contemporary figurative painting.
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€1,750
Product Details
Davis Lisboa, Musée des Aigles Modernes 21, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).
The painting draws on the photographic documentation of the fictional museum conceived by Marcel Broodthaers, focusing on the “Section XIXe siècle” (1968), one of its earliest configurations, installed in his apartment at 30 Rue de la Pépinière in Brussels. This inaugural display brought together objects, reproductions, and labeled transport crates, articulating an institutional fiction that displaced the apparatus of the museum into a domestic setting.
Rather than functioning as a transcription, the painting reformulates this image through the material language of oil, intensifying its density while shifting its documentary status. The scene takes on a suspended, subtly dreamlike quality in which documentary referents become unstable. The interior oscillates between lived space and exhibition display, activating a structural ambiguity that remains unresolved.
Within this framework, the work reflects on the role of photographic imagery in late 1960s conceptual art. In contrast to its indexical function—evident in the records of the “Section XIXe siècle” (1968)—the painterly translation restores thickness, opacity, and duration. The surface becomes a site of perceptual delay, where the image no longer operates as evidence but unfolds as experience.
The work situates itself within a broader genealogy of practices that reconfigure the museum as an artistic form, in dialogue with Boîte-en-valise (1935–1941) by Marcel Duchamp and Galerie Légitime (1962–1963) by Robert Filliou. In this sense, the Davis Museum Barcelona emerges as a contemporary extension of this gesture: a structure that operates simultaneously as artwork, archive, and critical framework, sustaining an ongoing dialogue between institutional memory and present-day production.
Additional information
| Weight | 5.2 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm |
