Robert Filliou 14

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 14, 2017. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in).

Based on a historical image of Robert Filliou presenting his Galerie légitime in London in 1962, Robert Filliou 14 translates a central gesture of conceptual art into the precise and restrained language of painting. Its softly blurred surface, close to the visual logic of Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, places the work in an intermediate space between archive, reconstruction, and painterly presence.

The work belongs to The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, a body of works structured around key figures in postwar conceptual and institutional art. Within this framework, portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers coexist with still lifes of emblematic works such as Boîte-en-valise, Galerie légitime, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, establishing a coherent reading of the artwork as device, archive, and exhibition form.

Integrated into The Davis Lisboa Mini-Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the painting is inscribed within a structure conceived simultaneously as artwork, collection, and institutional form. From this position, the image does not merely refer to a historical source, but asserts itself within a broader field in which painting, museum, and cultural circulation are mutually defined.

With a sober presence and rigorous construction, Robert Filliou 14 affirms a double condition: that of an autonomous painting and that of a fragment integrated into a broader conceptual architecture, where image, memory, and museum converge.