Richard Garet 1

Davis Lisboa, Richard Garet 1, 2011. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in)

This painting belongs to the beginnings of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, a portrait series dedicated to the first artists associated with the museum. Here, Davis Lisboa pays tribute to Richard Garet, the Uruguayan-American artist whose practice engages the material condition of sound and its relation to the visual field.

The composition draws on the legacy of Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, particularly his use of blur as a device that unsettles description and interrupts narrative certainty. Rather than fixing the sitter in stable terms, the image remains slightly withdrawn, allowing perception to move between recognition and dissolution.

Executed during the Gray Period (2011–2016), the work adopts a restrained pictorial language consistent with that body of work. Its square format also resonates with the architecture of Davis Museum Barcelona itself: a miniature contemporary art museum conceived simultaneously as readymade sculpture, nonprofit initiative, digital archive, and recognized cultural entity.

Within this framework, the painting extends a lineage of institutional critique associated with Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. The museum appears here not only as a structure of display, but as a conceptual form through which representation, authorship, and cultural value are reconsidered.