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Sara Keating: Game on – Butler Gallery’s new exhibition highlights connection between art and sport

The Art of Sport, a multimedia exhibition soon to open at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, showcases the work of Irish and international artists through their expression of the spirit of sport

American artist Paul Pfeiffer’s work Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from a photographic series, at the Butler Gallery. Picture: Paul Pfeiffer

During last year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, a video installation at the Butler Gallery by Kevin Atherton saw the artist challenge his younger self to a bout of fisticuffs. In Boxing Re-Match: 1972-2015, Atherton – clad in gold silk shorts and boxing boots – spliced new video footage with a historic performance piece: a warped mirror image á la Dorian Gray. The intricate choreography plausibly staged a generational battle across the artist’s own career: young or ...