Musée des Aigles Modernes 4

Davis Lisboa, Musée des Aigles Modernes 4, 2017. Oil on linen, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 x 15.7 x 1.38 in)

This painting takes as its point of departure the eagle emblem developed by Marcel Broodthaers in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968–1972), and more specifically in the exhibition Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute (1972). More than an iconographic motif, the eagle appears here as a form historically associated with authority, legitimacy, and the symbolic power of the institution.

The work reactivates that genealogy and shifts it into the present through a cloud of heart emojis, incorporating the affective language of digital culture. Through this gesture, the institutional emblem is displaced into a new regime of visibility, in which circulation, attachment, and desire operate as contemporary forms of symbolic validation.

Formally, the painting adopts a diffuse surface that recalls the pictorial vocabulary of Gerhard Richter, holding the image in suspension between appearance and erasure. The eagle does not present itself as a stable figure, but as a veiled presence absorbed into a visual field of controlled ambiguity.

Integrated into The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to a genealogy of artists who conceived their own museological dispositifs, from Duchamp with Boîte-en-valise and Filliou with La galerie légitime to Broodthaers, extending that tradition into the twenty-first century through the operative logic of the Davis Museum.