For the Independent Art Fair 2025, Ortuzar is pleased to present a focused selection of works by Ernie Barnes. Spanning five decades of Barnes’s career, the presentation will highlight the sports scenes that are at the heart of his oeuvre, ranging from football, baseball, to track and field.

Barnes began painting sports narratives in the late 1950s, drawing on his own background as a professional athlete in the American Football League (AFL) to depict the body in motion. Central to his approach was what he described as capturing “the spiritual element of being human,” by which he meant capturing passion through bodily movement. This manifests in his elongated, serpentine figures with closed eyes and distorted limbs, which take inspiration from the figuration of the Italian Mannerists and twentieth-century American masters, including Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Wyeth, Reginald Marsh, Norman Rockwell, George Bellows and Charles White. 

The earliest works on view are a series of ink-and-graphite drawings from 1965 to 1967, picturing football players in moments of action and repose. In some, players run, tackle and push toward the finish line; in others, they sit on the bench, possibly in the aftermath of a loss. In his autobiography, From Pads to Palette, Barnes recalls sketching across his playbook during team meetings, once earning a fifty-dollar fine from his coach, Jack Faulkner, for drawing instead of paying attention. Reflecting on his firsthand experience, Barnes sought “to tell a real truth of what it feels like to get hit, to hit, to run, to turn, to backpedal.” For Barnes, football was a kinetic experience, and the distortion and elongation of his figures convey the game’s visceral energy.

In the mid-1960s, Barnes retired from professional sports and turned fully to painting. During this period, he exhibited new work and became the official artist of the American Football League. In 1984, Barnes was appointed an artist of the 1984 Los Angeles summer Olympic Games. Since then, Barnes has created some of his most iconic sports compositions, capturing the grandeur of professional play in works like Hitting the Tape (2005) and Dead Heat (2004), both of which depict the finish line of track and field games, which are on view in the presentation. In works such as The Competitive Spirit (2005), Barnes paints a collapsed and defeated athlete surrounded by his coaches, evoking the pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–99) or Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ (1603–04). Similarly, in Pocket Passer (1992), he elevates a moment of the football game into a multifigure composition that recalls the scale and structure of historical painting, imbuing moments from contemporary sport with the gravitas of canonical art. In the drawings of baseball and football players on view, Barnes honors the quotidian scenes of his local community, demonstrating what he called the “spiritual currency of the ghetto,” a conscious challenge to the social contradictions inherent in the myth of the culturally deprived Black subject.

This presentation coincides with Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, an exhibition organized by SFMOMA and currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through January 26, 2026, which features works by Barnes. Recent solo exhibitions include Ernie Barnes: In Rapture, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2024); Ernie Barnes: Where Music and Soul Live, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2023); Ernie Barnes, Andrew Kreps Gallery, organized with Ortuzar Projects, New York (2021); Liberating Humanity from Within, UTA Artists Space, Los Angeles (2020); Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); and The North Carolina Roots of Artist Ernie Barnes, North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, North Carolina (2018-2019), among others.