Fondation Louis Vuitton is the latest cultural institution joining in on Olympic fever with a new exhibition centered around the intersection of sports and culture. Each of the artworks on display are sourced from the museum’s collection, spanning painting, photography and installations by pioneers of 20th century art, including Andy Warhol, Andreas Gursky, Omar Victor Diop, Abraham Poincheval, Roman Signer and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Entitled The Collection: A Sports Meeting, the exhibition offers a poetic reflection on sports. Appearing as a serene landscape of the Swiss Alps, Andreas Gursky’s Engadin (1995) reveals a trail of cross-country skiers embarking across a frozen tundra like a stream of ants, determined to make their mark amidst the towering backdrop of nature.
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop examines the socio-political histories interwoven in football. In Jean-Baptiste Belley (2014), named after the 18th century Senegalese slave who would become a prominent abolitionist politician in French parliament, Diop subverts a painting of Belley by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, perching a younger Black subject with a retro-style football in arms as a way to measure “where society is in terms of race,” he said in a statement.
“When you look at the way that African soccer royalty is perceived in Europe, there is a very interesting blend of glory, hero-worship and exclusion. Every so often, you get racist chants or banana skins thrown on the pitch and the whole illusion of integration is shattered in the most brutal way. It’s that kind of paradox I am investigating in the work.”
Olympic Rings (1985), a collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicts an African face prominently juxtaposed against a medley of rings that are repeated like commodified emblems that in a way reflects the commercialization of the sports world today. “The sense of humor, the snide remarks, the profound realizations, the simple chit-chat all happened with paint and brushes…,” Keith Haring once remarked of Warhol and Basquiat’s partnership. “There was a sense that one was watching something being unveiled and discovered for the first time.”
The Collection: A Sports Meeting will be on view in Paris until September 9, 2024, while the Olympic Games start on July 26 and run through August 11, 2024.
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 Av. du Mahatma Gandhi,
75116 Paris, France
