Football Vignette

American artist Duane Hanson’s “Football Vignette” dates from 1969. The pyramidically composed sculpture picks out that moment of climactic tension when a football player is brutally attacked by two members of the opposite team. Hanson’s group of figures, created at the time of the Vietnam War, addresses the issue of naked violence among humans. In competitive sports this violence is merely disguised as athleticism and carries society’s stamp of approval. Duane Hanson is widely regarded as one of the most influential American sculptors of the twentieth century working in a realist tradition. His works are characterized by a strong strain of social critique. In the 1960s, Hanson, influenced by pop art, started focussing on the darker sides of the American Way of Life, creating life-sized figures executed with great care for detail. Hanson, who is mainly interested in people from the middle and working classes, confronts the viewer with the social and political evils of an era. Hanson once said that his works did not even come close to reality. According to him, the world as it is is so remarkable and full of surprises that there is no need for the artist to exaggerate: "What’s already there is crazy enough."