Rachel Teagle 1

Davis Lisboa, Rachel Teagle 1, 2013. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in)

This portrait of Rachel Teagle was conceived within a series exploring conceptual connections between American university museums and Davis Museum Barcelona. Chosen for her role as founding director of the Manetti Shrem Museum, Teagle appears here as both a specific figure and part of a wider institutional dialogue.

The painting draws on the visual language of Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, translating a photographic source into oil through softened layers, blurred transitions, and restrained tonal shifts. The image remains deliberately unstable, holding the portrait between document and painterly construction.

That ambiguity is central to the work. Rather than presenting a fixed likeness, the painting allows the figure to emerge gradually, opening onto broader questions of representation, authorship, and the cultural structures through which images are framed and preserved.

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, the painting forms part of a series that reflects on artists who turned the museum into an artistic medium, extending 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.