"MONEYBALL" TYRRELL WINSTON: Knokke-le-Zoute

 

These words, attributed to Tyrrell Winston to describe the concept pioneered in the early 2000s by Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland Athletics, frame the foundation of Winston’s artistic vision.

 

Constructing from what no one else wants and seeing the untapped potential in people and objects alike, the work challenges the mythology of success—and asks: what is the true price of what we hold dear?

 

A world driven by systems and strategies demands countless efforts to reach goals: risk-taking, questioning established norms, and above all, enduring many more failures than triumphs, more discards than trophies. Winston crystallizes this reality by transforming sporting relics into artworks in A Beautiful Failure, and celebrity signatures into pictorial gestures in Who Replacing Who? (Michael Jordan)—restoring value to worn and exhausted surfaces and names, enabling them to attain an immaterial, even immortal, dimension.

 

One gesture defines his series and evokes the tensions of elemental persistence and energy flows: repetition. Through mechanical reproduction of objects, calligraphy, and slogans, he confronts the era’s dominant order. This essence stands out in Knock Out (Red and Black), Fade Away (Navy and Orange), and Hail Mary (Navy and Yellow), all from The Sheepskins—a series inspired by Christopher Wool and exhibited at the Brussels gallery in May–June 2025 as part of A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Each piece carries a personal, ambitious, yet often illusory narrative. Alongside the Basketball Wall Works and Punishment Paintings, these works reflect unique yet disguised origins of identity beneath a uniform guise—a symbol of legitimacy.

 

This isn’t frontal critique. Instead, for the Detroit-based artist, it’s an abstract and sculptural reinterpretation of Billy Beane’s philosophy: uncovering poetry within the apparent coldness of numbers, stripping away auras to reveal formal beauty. Winston overlays this counterintuitive vision with his own system and values. His obsessive gathering, reconfiguration, and fusion of materials found in the streets—of Manhattan and Brooklyn—mirror the life, circulation, transformation, and destruction that shape both tangible and intangible human existence.

 

In Moneyball, Winston uses sport as the starting point of his inquiry, but the worlds he depicts invite us to extrapolate to broader societal realms. Perhaps he even questions his own role as an artist—the implicit rules required to create works and to build a team that’s both cohesive and distinctive.