Vs.
Paul Pfeiffer
Vs.
World-renowned artist Paul Pfeiffer presents Vs. a meditation on our collective cultural obsession with mass spectacle and ritual, Vs. is comprised of edited footage pulled from two iconic boxing matches featuring eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao.
Paul Pfeiffer’s first NFT collection, Vs., transports the viewer to the boxing ring and highlights found footage from two highly anticipated historical boxing matches — Pacquiao vs. Horn and Pacquiao vs. Mayweather.
To create each piece, Pfeiffer has taken existing televised footage and digitally erased Pacquiao’s opponent, leaving the viewer to witness a man struggling, resisting, suffering, and at times prevailing over a ghostly foe who is as unseen as he is undeniably present.
More than an image of sports, Pfeiffer brings his unsparing eye to a culture of cameras and media distribution that ultimately lands, painfully, in a body. The collection presents us with an incredibly evocative and moving work by one of the great visual artists of our time.
From the Collection
Paul Pfeiffer
A pioneer of video and computer-based art, Paul Pfeiffer has created celebrated works that sample and re-edit footage from televised sports, concerts, and other mass media events. Exploring the relationship between public spectacle, image culture, and individual and group identity formation, his work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, LACMA, and Hirshhorn Museum. Pfeiffer has received solo exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Art Center, the MCA Chicago, Honolulu Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Photo by At Maculangan
For me, the legacy of pictures is a desire to disrupt the surface illusion of reality and to access another dimension.—Paul Pfeifer