From Andy Warhol to Matthew Barney—these artists have turned a keen eye on the world of sports.
by Richard Whiddington 
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In language, the worlds of art and sports are not so far apart. Both speak of heavyweights, maestros, masterful technique, and the exhibition of talent. Their ends, too, have drawn closer in the age of the mega fair and the hyper-competitive auction market. For a time, art was sport, in the Olympics at least. Until 1948, artists competed for medals in the “Pentathlon of the Muses,” submitting sport-inspired work across architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
In the post-war era, when art wanders into the realm of sport it is typically not to venerate human athleticism, but to poke, probe, and critique, as these eight works show.
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Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali (1978)
Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali (1978). Photo: courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
After the soup cans, the movie stars, the political icons, and the pet portraits came the athletes. Andy Warhol was not a fan of sports, and it was only at the behest of Richard Weisman, a sports-crazed collector, that the king of Pop Art turned his gaze upon it. Warhol was, however, interested in American violence (as shown in his Death and Disaster series) and so found a natural subject in Muhammad Ali, then a three-time world champion.
Unlike previous screen prints, Warhol worked from his own photographs with Ali. He traveled to the boxer’s training camp in rural Pennsylvania and shot 50-odd Polaroids, choosing four. They are unusual. In contrast to his public persona, Ali appears calm, introverted, and dispassionate. Somehow, his fist seems less menacing, as though the man is different once away from the limelight. All the same, Ali soon joined Mao, Marilyn Monroe, and Mick Jagger in selling at $25,000 a pop. Ali couldn’t believe people would pay so much for a picture of “this little Kentuckian.” The modesty, of course, was false.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Famous Negro Athletes (1981)
A post shared by Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat (@basquiatofficial)
Off of the wall and onto the page: that’s the legend behind Jean-Michel Basquiat’s searing, and now iconic, drawing. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Basquiat covered Lower Manhattan under the tag of SAMO©, demanding art world attention in the best way the young, Black, unknown artist knew how. It worked on Glenn O’Brien, the critic and downtown personality. After spotting a giant mural of three black faces and the words “Famous Negro Athletes,” he told Basquiat it was the best thing he’d ever seen. The next day, the artist gifted O’Brien a version on paper.
Famous Negro Athletes (1981) transfers the energy of street art onto the page, offering a row of faces drawn with furious intensity. They are anonymous and inscrutable, suggestive of the way America (gestured to in the red and blue boxes scribbled over with yellow) treats its Black athletes. “The piece was political,” O’Brien said. “It presented so simply how society expected Black people to be athletes and not painters.”
Hank Willis Thomas, Liberty (2015)
Hank Willis Thomas, Liberty (2015). Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum.
Hank Willis Thomas first gained art world traction with his photographs of Black bodies scarred with Nike’s swoosh. The close-up images of chiseled torsos and shaved heads appear like perversions of glossy advertisements. Thomas was preoccupied by Nike’s assent to global dominance through the exploitation of Michael Jordan. Whereas before the Black body was branded as a sign of ownership, now it was branded as a means of generating revenue—Jordan’s silhouette alone capable of selling millions of pairs of shoes.
When Thomas introduced sculpture into his practice a decade on, this focus on sports and the Black body remained. One such work is Liberty (2015), a three-foot-high fiberglass sculpture of a well-toned arm balancing a basketball on its fingertip. The arm was taken from a cast of the retired NBA player Juwan Howard and the image itself was pulled from a 1986 issue of Life Magazine in which a Harlem Globetrotter poses in front of the Statue of Liberty. With its provocative title and by removing a body part/image from its context, Thomas forces us to think about the whole—and with it the story that is absent.
Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985)
Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr.J Silver Series (1985)
Image: Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
In the early 1980s, Koons became obsessed with the concept of equilibrium. To him, it reflected the human spirit, one filled with soaring dreams but checked by the gravity of reality. The vehicle he imagined for the metaphor was a solitary basketball infinitely suspended in a water tank. It was a riff on the Duchamp readymade, one pointing to American consumerism and the promise of social mobility.
In Koons’s telling, he hunkered down in libraries and brushed up on his physics. Research suggested the feat was impossible in a small tank and so he called up Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
After two years, an answer was found. The basketball was pumped with water and two-thirds of the tank was filled with a solution of refined salt and distilled water. The remaining third was carefully poured into the top of the tank so that the ball would float rather than sit on its surface. Even so, over time, the two waters mingle by way of vibrations and temperature changes and the basketball sinks. An apt metaphor in itself.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Short Story (2020)
Elmgreen & Dragset, Short Story (2020). Photo: 66JIANG.
In the eyes of Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, today’s leisure pursuits are overly prescribed and weighed down by rules. Take the game of tennis, the setting for Short Story (2020), which they installed in the nave of St Agnes, the Brutalist church turned König Galerie’s exhibition space in Berlin.
At first, the scene seems ordinary: an orange rectangle divided by a net and governed by familiar white lines. Take a lap of the court and this impression fades. On each side of the net is a white-lacquered bronze sculpture of a boy. One lies face down in exhaustion, his racket tossed aside, seemingly dejected in the aftermath of defeat. The other faces away from his competitor holding a silver trophy. Despite victory, he seems forlorn. His shoulders are slumped, his expression glum.
Short Story questions our individualistic, hyper-competitive society and the cost of success. It’s a metaphor in snapshot, one watched by a third sculpture: an aged man slouched half-asleep in a wheelchair. What to make of him isn’t entirely clear and that, Elmgreen & Dragset said, is precisely the point.
Ernie Barnes, Homecoming (1994)
Ernie Barnes, Homecoming (1994). Photo courtesy estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
Later, long after he had hung up the pads and taken up the palette full-time, Ernie Barnes would admit that even during his playing days, his heart had always been more art than football. Prior to four seasons as an offensive lineman in the American Football League, Barnes had been a star athlete at North Carolina Central University and studied art under Ed Wilson, the African American sculptor. Wilson encouraged Barnes to focus on the body in motion and to paint from his own experiences—when he did so on the side lines of the Denver Broncos, however, he was fined.
Homecoming (1994) follows Wilson’s guidance. A pristine marching band moves in perfect lockstep with a gait reminiscent of striding athletes. In the foreground, spectators spin and pose and sway, carried away by the music in a celebration of black joy that echoes the scene of Barnes’s best known painting, The Sugar Shack (1976).
Set at an intersection in Durham, North Carolina, that marks the change from the downtown to the Black business and residential area, it’s a tribute to HBCU bands and the sense of community sports can bring. As Barnes put it: “the fast-paced, high-steppin’, soul-driven cadence of the drums made everybody feel good and they moved in sync with the music. The young, the old, crippled and decrepit, all vibrated inside with joy.”
Trenton Doyle Hancock, CAMH Court (2023)
Installation view of CAMH COURT. Photo: courtesy Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Francisco Ramos.
For Trenton Doyle Hancock, practice is play. The Houston-based artist considers his paintings large toys and his studio an open playground. This artistic ethos became literal with CAMH Court (2023), in which Hancock installed a playable basketball court inside the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Hancock filled the court and its backboards with his Bringback characters, black-and-white humanoid creatures that belong to the artist’s invented cartoon universe. One challenge was the gallery’s parallelogram shape, which forced the artist to contort a regulation court into the space (with a little help from Adidas). “The basketball court is highly dynamic and generates a new kind of game,” Hancock said. Even so, this game had rules, ones painted in black on a white gallery wall. These included signing a waiver, wearing rubber soled shoes, and last of all to “have fun.”
Matthew Barney, Secondary (2023)
Matthew Barney, Secondary (2023). Photo: courtesy Gladstone Gallery.
During an exhibition football game in 1978, New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley was paralyzed for life when a tackle by Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum broke his spine. A young Matthew Barney was watching on television and, in his telling, the accident captivated him, deepening his love for the sport.
In Secondary (2023), Barney created a warped re-enactment of the horror, plumbing the violence to interrogate the society that so readily produces and consumes it. To do so, Barney filled his Long Island City studio with the trappings of the sport: a giant LED clock is affixed to the wall outside and astroturf, illuminated by floodlights, covers the floor. A jumbotron at midfield, together with screens in the corner, show Barney among actors who perform caustic versions of the sport’s rituals. All the while, the clock ticks down to its brutal climax.
Lingering to one side is a six-foot-deep trench dug into the studio’s foundation exposing it to the East River tides, a blunt reminder that the whole structure is broken.
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