Paul Pfeiffer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is an ongoing series of manipulated photographs. The series began with publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe, in which the central figure was removed. More recently, Pfeiffer has turned to images from the NBA archives as source material. In these, contextual details are removed—team names, the basketball, any reference to the sport—to reveal a solitary figure displaced before a crowd of onlookers. The title of the series is an art historical reference to the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, an innovator in the representation of the human body and a student of anatomy to those ends.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is also a biblical allusion, a reference to the figures that will appear when the world comes to an end at Armageddon. Borrowing this title, Pfeiffer conjures not only the study of the figure as it relates to the Western pictorial tradition, but an ominousness that is indicated by the appearance (and disappearance) of the figure.