Related to Games

About

Games appear in art as pastimes, as moral warnings and as systems to tinker with. The Athenian painter Exekias showed Achilles and Ajax bent over a board game on an amphora of about 530 BC, and Sofonisba Anguissola's The Chess Game (1555) portrays her sisters at play under a servant's watchful eye. Pieter Bruegel the Elder crowded dozens of pastimes into Children's Games (1560). Card tables brought darker moods: Caravaggio's The Cardsharps (c. 1594) shows a young man being cheated, and Paul Cézanne's The Card Players series of the 1890s turns farmhands into still, solid forms.

Modern artists often change the rules. Yoko Ono's White Chess Set (1966) paints every piece and square white, so players lose track of the sides. Video games became raw material in the 2000s: Cory Arcangel hacked a Super Mario cartridge to leave only drifting clouds, and Feng Mengbo reworked the shooter Quake into installations.