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OOF Magazine #14
OOF Magazine #14
Zinedine Zidane | Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno | Danica Lundy | Ángel Zárraga | Craigie Harper | Babajide Brian | Eva-Maria Lopez | Diego Maradona
This is it, this is the big one: probably the single most important work of football art ever made. The cover feature of issue 14 is an in-depth oral history of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 landmark film, ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’. Featuring candid interviews with the artists, this is something we've been working up for years. Mind you, the rest of the mag ain't too shabby either. We’ve got Ossian Ward on the art historical beauty of Maradona, Oliver Basciano on Mexican painter Ángel Zárraga, Rosemary Waugh on Danica Lundy’s high school football paintings, Chris Waywell on Eva-Maria Lopez’s photographs of pitch-green living rooms, Emily Steer on Babajide Brian's meticulous player portraits and Scottish artist Craigie Harper on how he came to invent a whole football team.
Now, that is big.
FOOTBALL IS the quintessential communal experience. Across the world - in stadiums, bars and living rooms - countless milions of people experience collective emotion through the teams they support. As one, they feel the ecstatic joy of a goal scored, or the crushing pain of a brutal defeat. It's a mass experience, communal emotion on a huge scale. Every day, football does with ease what art constantly tries to do: it makes people feel.
And because it plays such an important part in the everyday life of so many people, it has been a recurring topic in fine art for centuries. From Flemish landscapes filled with children kicking around animal bladders to multi-screen contemporary video installations, football acts as a symbol: a metaphor for national obsession, passion, physicality, belief, and any number of human emotions and experiences.
But it's not a one-way relationship: art's job is to deconstruct the world, to help us figure out what everything means, to offer new perspectives. The artists featured in OOF peel back the layers of meaning in this obsessive sport, and help us make sense of something bigger and more ungraspable in the process. OOF hopefully goes a little way towards laying all of that bare. Football and art have been intertwined for centuries, we're just going to try to unravel that a little bit.
OOF is published twice a year. You can buy the current issue and most of the back issues from our gallery shop or via our online store. An annual UK subscription is just £14, Europe £24 and ROW £26.80.