A Million Seats and a Carved Justin Bieber, Paul Pfeiffer Brings Olympia to Perrotin
The artist imagines the Coliseum with a million seats and shows Seville woodcarvers’ Christ-like take on Justin Bieber’s tattooed body.
Paul Pfeiffer has come back to Los Angeles with Olympia, a solo exhibition at Perrotin on West Pico Boulevard that opened September 18 and runs through November 7. It follows his 2023 to 2024 survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and it aims straight at a city getting ready for the 2028 Summer Olympics.
The centerpiece, Vitruvian Figure (Olympia), appears as a series of architectural renderings that blow up the L.A. Memorial Coliseum into an impossible stadium with 1,000,000 seats. It expands on his 2008 sculpture Vitruvian Figure, a large-scale maquette of a phantom stadium of the same size. The Coliseum, built in 1923, was modeled after the Roman Colosseum, hosted the 1932 Summer Olympics and will be a site of the 2028 Games. It even holds a block of granite from the Roman original, a gift from the Italian government in 1949, the exhibition text notes.
Then there is the pop star. The newest installment of Pfeiffer’s Incarnator series, begun in 2018, is a multi-part wooden sculpture based on historical icons of the body of Christ. He asked traditional woodcarvers from the Seville region of Spain, artisans known for religious icons, to interpret the tattooed body of Justin Bieber. The figure comes in fragments, arms, torso, legs and head, a wooden incarnation of a singer whose career began with YouTube videos he posted as a child.
The exhibition text also points to Bieber’s recent scaled-down sets, at Coachella, where he performed in front of his early social media clips, and at the halftime ceremonies of the 2026 FIFA World Cup final, where he sang with an acoustic guitar.
Pfeiffer works in video, photography, sculpture and sound, and he gravitates to moments made for mass audiences, from live sports and stadium concert tours to televised game shows and celebrity glamour shots. In his 2001 video Long Count (Thrilla in Manilla), he erased the bodies of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, leaving a ghostly dance for the camera to follow.
The text leans on the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, who wrote that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Perrotin is at 5036 West Pico Boulevard, and Olympia stays up through November 7.
