Paul Pfeiffer, "The Playroom." (Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery)

Wilt Chamberlain, who was so good on a basketball court the NBA had to widen the free-throw lane in order to keep him back from the net, wrote two autobiographies. The first, from 1973, Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, boasts of certain sexual extravagances. The second, 1991’s A View From Above, is more specific; it includes the famous unverified statement that the number of Chamberlain’s sexual encounters was “closing in on twenty thousand women,” a claim that adds a certain layer of subtext to his on-the-court nickname, the Big Dipper. He presents this lofty figure in the manner of a basketball statistic. “Yes that’s correct, twenty thousand different ladies. At my age, that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.” Chamberlain, by the way, still holds the record for most rebounds for a career—the fairly coincidental figure of 23,924.

The artist Paul Pfeiffer, whose debut show at the Paula Cooper Gallery opened last week, is known for his clever manipulation of sports footage. Basketball is a recurring interest. It feels almost inevitable that he should have chosen Chamberlain as his muse for his first exhibition in New York since 2007.

“He’s one of the fathers of the athlete celebrity,” Mr. Pfeiffer said in an interview near his studio just south of Midtown. “He literally changed the game of basketball. They changed the markings on the court to simply make it fairer for other players. He was just so much taller and more powerful than anyone else, it wasn’t fair.”

For the art world, 2007 is about as far away as Chamberlain’s iconic, mostly undocumented 100-point game against the Knicks in 1962, when he was still playing for the Philadelphia Warriors. (Mr. Pfeiffer projects a filmed faux re-creation of this milestone in a dark corner of the gallery.) Four years after being the breakout star at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Pfeiffer seemed bred for representation by Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world. The centerpiece of his first and only show there was a staggering video work called Empire, which showed, in real time, a hornet’s nest being constructed over the course of three-months. He says he appreciates “the value of slowness.”

In 1998, he was one of the first artists to join a new gallery in Harlem, The Project, founded by an intrepid young dealer named Christian Haye; Mr. Pfeiffer “helped string the lights.” The Project was an immediate success, and moved to 57th Street, then opened a space in Los Angeles with the dealer Michele Maccarone, which was inaugurated by a solo show by Mr. Pfeiffer. It all happened fast. Early on, Mr. Haye struck a deal with the collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann for right of first refusal on certain artworks. The gallery would eventually lose $1.7 million in a lawsuit when Mr. Lehmann realized several large works by Julie Mehretu had been sold to other collectors without being offered to him first. Mr. Pfeiffer stuck around until the very end. The last time many people in the art world heard from Mr. Haye was in December 2009, when he took a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach but failed to fill it due to what the fair characterized as “shipping problems.” The dealer himself showed up in Miami, but declined a reporter’s questions. Since then he has effectively disappeared. (Simon Preston, who was a director at The Project, said Mr. Haye’s current obscurity is probably intentional, though he hasn’t spoken with him much either.) After the gallery closed, Mr. Pfeiffer started showing frequently in London and Berlin and lived for a time in Europe.

“This is still my hometown,” he said. “But when The Project didn’t exist anymore, I didn’t feel any rush to jump to a new gallery. I sort of grew up with this gallery, and that was enough for me for a long time. But there are some pressures.”

Mr. Pfeiffer has been based out of New York since 1990. He was born in Honolulu in 1966, and moved to the Philippines when he was 10. His parents were both classically trained musicians who taught and studied sacred music. In the Philippines, where he lived until the age of 15, he didn’t have a television, but he says you didn’t need one to register the country’s sweeping fascination with American popular culture. He got to know America “through a certain lens of otherness.”

“To me, sports is attractive because it just is so foreign to me,” he said. “I couldn’t really follow the action, so I would just sort of stare at the imagery.”

In conversation, he compares crowds at a sports stadium to Francis Bacon’s painting, Fragment of a Crucifixion.  In 1998 he made a piece named for that work, a 30-second video loop of former Knicks forward Larry Johnson giving a triumphant shout in the moment right after scoring, but with all of the recognizable signifiers of a basketball game—aside from the featureless audience in the far away bleachers— carefully edited out; the nets, the ball, the other players, even the Knicks logo on Mr. Johnson’s jersey. There’s something simultaneously eerie and hilarious about the work, and it all comes down to a single question, one that people would never ask when they’re actually watching a game: why is everybody yelling?

In 1986, as he was preparing to turn 50, Wilt Chamberlain told a reporter for CNN, “I have no need to raise any little Wilties. Not any—especially in a world where overpopulation is our biggest problem.” Considering how many women he claimed to have had intercourse with, he and his thousands of partners were either very good with contraceptives or his childlessness is a historic statistical anomaly.

“He’s ultimately this prototype for a kind of playboy,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “A model for everyone to aspire to at a moment when people were really throwing off the social values of the 1950s and actualizing this idea of freedom. Moral freedom, freedom to adopt a hedonistic and unrestrained lifestyle.” It seems, he said, “just impossible” that Chamberlain didn’t father any children.

The fantasy of Chamberlain having illegitimate offpsring served as the starting point for a work in the Paula Cooper show. It’s constructed around a home movie from 1971, transferred from 8mm tape to video, that features a group of children on a trip to the zoo with two unidentified women; the patriarch either has been carefully edited out or is absent entirely. For a home movie, it is impossibly well-made. Mr. Pfeiffer is deliberately vague about its origins. “I don’t want to interfere,” he said.

Certain clues come from a series of photographs of locations from the film, which also appear to be heavily edited. The children and their mysterious chaperones are all absent, leaving behind what look like establishing shots of the zoo. They are all dated May 1971, and Alexis Johnson, an associate director at Paula Cooper, said they depict “Four locations for a home movie” and are “from a friend. That’s as much as Paul is giving us.” The year 1971, for what it’s worth, was when Chamberlain signed a two-year contract with the Lakers and won 33 straight games with the team in the 1971-72 season. It was also the year construction was completed on his mansion at 15216 Antelo Place in Los Angeles, the house where he built a chamber of sexual pleasures called the Playroom.

After graduate school at Hunter College, Mr. Pfeiffer got a job working at a post house scanning stock photos to digitize the inventory. A lot of his early work involved collages made from digitally scanning cutouts of these kinds of images. It wasn’t long before he got his first teaching job, a Photoshop class at Parsons. He spent his nights in the school’s library, working with digital editing programs. An important early piece, his video triptych The Long Count, was the culmination of all these influences, and laid the groundwork for a lot of what would come next. It uses stock footage of Muhammad Ali’s championship fights with George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston, but with the fighters and referees edited out. What remains of them looks like translucent silhouettes making meaningless gestures.

Later in 2001, Mr. Pfeiffer went to London to research the old Wembley football stadium. He’d learned that on off days, stadiums would generate income by doing tours. He liked the idea of doing a project in an empty space that is capable of fitting a few tens of thousands of people.

“In some ways, video in a gallery or in a museum is—or was—an awkward thing,” he said. “It’s becoming more integrated into the architecture. But at Wembley, video was integrated into the architecture from the beginning. And in some sense, a stadium is nothing but a place to create and watch video. So purely on a material level, as a video artist, a stadium is kind of the best place to work.”

The new Wembley was built on the same site as the old stadium, with a sound system of thousands of individual speakers installed underneath the seats, a sound manipulator’s dream. Mr. Pfeiffer wanted to do a project in which people stood on the field while recordings of the crowds from the iconic 1966 World Cup final, when England beat West Germany in extra time at the old Wembley, would be broadcasted aloud. Ultimately, the new stadium turned down the project, and Mr. Pfeiffer had to install it in an empty warehouse next door. What he ended up with was called The Saints, and after many years in the making, it was unveiled in 2007. A number of carefully hidden speakers play what sounds like the actual tape from the World Cup game, but Mr. Pfeiffer once again approaches sports from an uncanny place. He had recorded the track himself with a crowd of Filipinos from Manila. The re-creation is so authentic, it’s hard to believe it isn’t the real thing.

The centerpiece of Wilt Chamberlain’s house, the so-called Playroom, gave Mr. Pfeiffer’s exhibition its title, and it is reconstructed, on a smaller scale, in the center of the gallery. The real Playroom was a five-sided room lined with mirrors. It contained a waterbed eight feet in diameter that was sometimes covered in black rabbit fur, surrounded by purple velvet wedge sofas.

The model in the gallery is covered in one-sided mirrors. This results in a never-ending reflection of the model’s interior. The model is unadorned, but based on existing pictures, it’s a mostly faithful approximation. There’s something seductive about this large and glowing mirrored object resting in the center of a dark room—it makes of the viewer an archaeologist stumbling upon a mysterious relic. It’s also very creepy: all context has been removed, and in its absence, only context somehow remains. It’s like the old trick of getting someone to think about an elephant by telling her not to think of one. What was Wilt into? What kinds of things happened here? What does “1.2 women a day” mean, exactly? Does one even want to know? Is visiting an art gallery always an act of voyeurism, or is this an exception? After the flood of questions, only the stark object remains, and it doesn’t offer any answers.

mmiller@observer.com