Robert Filliou 21

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 21, 2019. Oil on linen, 60 × 60 × 3.5 cm (23.6 × 23.6 × 1.38 in).

Based on an iconic image of Robert Filliou with his Galerie légitime, presented during the Festival of Misfits in London in 1962, this painting revisits one of the most emblematic gestures of portable exhibition making. The work approaches that moment not simply as documentation, but as an image through which authorship, display, and artistic mobility converge.

Translated into oil on linen, the portrait does not seek descriptive fidelity. Instead, it subjects the source to a process of visual reduction in which the figure is partially dissolved, allowing the image to remain suspended between recognition and withdrawal.

Executed in a corporate blue palette, the painting establishes a direct relation to the visual identity of Davis Museum Barcelona. The square format reinforces this connection, linking the portrait to the museum’s own structural and symbolic geometry.

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, it extends 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, where the museum itself becomes an artistic medium.