MAY 20 – JUL 19, 2026

The Bass is excited to announce Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait on view at the museum May 20 through July 19, 2026. The exhibition is timed to align with the FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer matches and the Fan Festival events taking place in host city Miami throughout this summer.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a two-channel film installation conceived by artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. Centered on the iconic French soccer star, Zinédine Zidane—at the time among the most recognized players in the world—the work reimagines portraiture through the language of contemporary spectacle. Rather than documenting a career or recounting biographical milestones, the artists construct an intense, time-bound study of a single individual under the glare of global attention.

The film unfolds during a championship soccer match between teams, Real Madrid and Club de Fútbol, played on April 23, 2005, at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Seventeen synchronized cameras and operators were stationed throughout the stadium tasked with following Zidane continuously for the duration of the game. Rather than following the ball, the operators remained committed to the subject, recording him continuously from shifting distances and vantage points. Viewers experience the sensation of pacing the field face-to-face with him, attuned not to the match but to the rhythms of a single body within it. The match itself becomes a structure of time— ninety uninterrupted minutes—within which a portrait gradually emerges in real time.

Installed across two large projections, the piece highlights the contrast between different modes of image-making. One screen presents a composed, cinematic edit, incorporating the live television broadcast; the other shows unembellished, close-up footage from one of the dedicated cameras. At certain moments, the two projections align; at others, they diverge, revealing how perspective shapes what we see. This dual structure highlights the difference between spectacle and observation, between the mediated event consumed by millions, and the intimate, sustained act of looking. The work has the same duration as the match itself and is screened on a continuous loop, preserving the integrity of the original event.

In this piece, Zidane appears at a monumental scale, his figure magnified so that the smallest details become visible. These gestures, often unnoticeable in conventional sports coverage, accumulate into a portraiture study. Gordon and Parreno evoke traditions of painted portraiture, where personality is conveyed through posture and expression. Their approach recalls the filmed screen tests of Andy Warhol, translating the logic of portraiture into moving image. By isolating nuances, the installation transforms a mass-media event into a meditation on presence. The work questions how heroes are constructed, circulated, and consumed. Zidane’s renowned technical precision and unpredictable intensity emerge not as highlights but as sustained states of being.

Sound plays a key role in shaping the experience. Roars from tens of thousands of spectators swell and recede, at times giving way to near-silence-commentary from Spanish television intermingles with an original score by the Scottish rock band, Mogwai, creating a shifting acoustic landscape that oscillates between public frenzy and inward reflection. The auditory elements move the viewer between the charged atmosphere of competition and a more contemplative register, evoking the heightened flow space inhabited by elite athletes.

Throughout art history, portraiture has sought to distill the essence of a person within a specific moment. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait extends that lineage into the twenty-first century, using the medium of global media to examine how contemporary icons are constructed and perceived. Two artists, two screens, one player–the work reframes a mass spectacle as a concentrated act of looking, transforming a single match into an enduring meditation on presence, performance, and the making of modern heroes.