PORTRAITS OF A MODERN MYTHOLOGY

Muhammad Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier in 1971 has entered history as The Fight of The Century. It was both a landmark New York event and a global cultural phenomenon, attracting a live audience of 400 million people.

Inspired in part by Francis Bacon’s experiments with boxing imagery, Nemesis is an artistic homage to this fight in the form of an installation of 15 huge paintings, each 8 feet tall and up to 16 feet wide.

The Fight of the Century is recast as an existential drama: a treatise on the human body in motion and under duress. The inner life of a great fight is here portrayed with power, refinement and pathos.

With roots in centuries of artistic precedent, we recognize Nemesis for what it is - one of the most extreme essays in the long history of Art’s attempts to find beauty and meaning in human combat.

     Fiona Starr, M.A. Leeds University
    April, 2025