Art attack! New paintings highlight greenwashing at the heart of the 2024 Olympics

Finish Line by Judith Dean

Prolific artist and former amateur athlete Judith Dean has created two new paintings for the Cool Down Network and the Badvertising Campaign: ‘Own Goal’ and ‘Finish Line'. 

Drawing on sporting imagery and the highly polluting sponsors that come with it, she asks over and over again, in each part of her paintings, why fossil fuels continue to be profiled in this way when they cause so much damage and hurtle us towards climate catastrophe. In her signature way - working with her non-writing hand - Dean’s paintings ask how we look at images and what these perspectives really entail. As the stage before you recedes from the frame, dead ends and shifting horizons invite a viewer to question what’s real. Sport has become so mired in image control for major polluters, that our attention is manipulated to focus on the narrow and commercially expedient idea that these sponsorships are necessary and unquestionable. Tying together multiple images within each canvas, Dean examines the greenwashing at the heart of so many major sporting events. She asks who is really in control of the images the public is fed, and is there another way?

Own Goal by Judith Dean

Dean said:

“I’m deeply concerned that fossil fuel and big polluter sponsorship continues in the face of the already devastating effects of climate change on sport, athletes and fans, and on everyone's increasingly uncertain futures. I sincerely hope the Cool Down network and Badvertising campaign are successful in their work and campaigns, and that you enjoy the paintings in the meantime.”

In ‘Own Goal’ a Toyota SUV has crashed into the Olympic rings, sending them flying; a goalkeeper playing for Toyota Serrano hangs in mid-air, scaled down to become a broader metaphor for humanity as it endlessly scores the own goal; a sunset or sunrise is positioned at the top of the painting, intrinsically asking whether climate change is a new beginning or the close of play. 

‘Finish Line’ is more populated, although most figures have lost their heads, torsos, in a kind of sadomasochistic free for all - the modus operandi of the 21st century. Remaining bodies are white, to reflect connections between colonialism, the so-called enlightenment, resource extraction and mass consumption that drives climate change, and the devastating effects of the Anthropocene / Capitalocene. Dean paints pseudo trompe-l’oeil frames around virtually all of her paintings, to interrogate further ideas of illusion and framing itself. 

Recent research from the Badvertising campaign recently found that just three sponsorship deals between the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympics Games and highly polluting companies will generate 33.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent; more emissions than eight coal plants running for an entire year. The most famous sporting event in the world is not immune from this threat. Even before the pandemic changed the date, the Tokyo 2021 Olympics were “the hottest in history” with conditions described as “torturous”, with athletes warning that extreme heat at the Paris 2024 Olympics could pose a risk to athletes’ lives.

In these paintings, Dean begs the question: is this really the best we can imagine for sport?