The Game Played is Richard Moss’ final homage to Nelson Mandela — a series of six works that map Mandela’s life through chess. Each work offers a meditation on character, circumstance, and strategy, refracting Mandela’s story through the lens of the game that both entertained and mirrored his long struggle for justice.

Moss begins with six topical portraits: Mandela as Thinker, Boxer, Tribesman, Pimpernel, Gardener, and Statesman. Each composition, first created as a unified image, is dissected into 64 squares following the grid and notation of a chessboard. The squares — 384 in total — are then recomposed into six final works that are at once fragmented and whole. The process echoes Mandela’s life: shaped by external forces, yet held together by foresight, character, resilience, and a relentless drive toward freedom.

This formal strategy allows Moss to thread together experience, instinct, and imagination. The Boxer channels Mandela’s discipline and composed aggression; the Pimpernel his stealth and adaptability; the Tribesman his rootedness in ancestral land; the Gardener his quiet cultivation of life even within prison walls; the Thinker his contemplation of classic texts alongside present dilemmas; the Statesman his patient, deliberate moves in the long game of political change.

Chess itself has long compelled artists — from Delacroix and Klee to Matisse and Duchamp — as both object and metaphor. For Mandela, chess and drafts were more than pastimes; they offered mental exercise, companionship, and reflection during years of imprisonment. His approach, as remembered by contemporaries, was one of attrition: slow, deliberate, punctuated by unpredictable moves that unsettled opponents and revealed the depth of his strategic mind.

Moss’ relationship with chess is deep-rooted. Taught the game by his father in Cape Town at age six, he became a nationally ranked player during his school years, drawn to the knight’s angular, unexpected path. 

Moss' first private commission — a portrait of Mandela gifted to the Nelson Mandela Foundation in 2006 — began a personal artistic dialogue with Mandela’s life and legacy.

Completed in March 2014, The Game Played stands as both an artistic tribute and an invitation. Through this series, Moss asks us to consider how lives — like games — are shaped move by move, square by square. In these reconstituted artworks, we glimpse not only Mandela’s journey but also the broader patterns of struggle, resilience, and hope that define the human experience.