Opera Gallery’s involvement in “Art Fever” started a year before the 1998 Football World Cup in France. The President of Adidas Japan, Christophe Bézu, knew of our gallery and contacted us with a proposal to mount a contemporary art show on the theme of football – an original subject indeed!

The idea fired us up straight away, and we lost no time in selecting and commissioning internationally acclaimed artists – with whom we are in permanent contact – to get them launched on the project.

The artists’ response was just as enthusiastic as ours: quite a surprise, considering that few of them had ever worked on or even thought about that particular subject, and even fewer were actual football fans…

Quitting their own field of artistic exploration, they rose to the challenge of adapting their personal style to this very unusual theme, while offering the viewer artworks of striking fascination and beauty.

Among the artists who took part, mention should be made of Martin Engler, Raya Sorkine, Robert Combas, Arman, Nicolae Maniu, Ron English, Peter Klasen (and forty others)…

All the works (about fifty) were then put at the disposal of Adidas early this year for the first exhibition in Tokyo (March 2002) at the Bunkamura Museum, co-organizer of the show in Japan.

Since then the artworks have been exhibited to the public in a show travelling from city to city as far as Yokohama, with stops in Nagoya, Osaka et Fukuoka.

At the same time a website has kept track of the artwork auctions in favour of children (UNICEF), which were held from March to June
In addition, a monumental sculpture by Pierre Matter, an artist from Alsace, France, has been donated to the city of Yokohama and will be installed in front of the city’s football stadium on 11 May.

The show has extensions into the world of the manga comic books highly popular with the Japanese, and French artists are also involved. The final part of the exhibition will run for the whole month of June in one of the World Cup cities, Yokohama. It will close on the day of the World Cup Final, 30 June 2002.


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