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LONDON – 8-year-old Annie Lawrence looked excited Sunday afternoon. He was about to see Tottenham Hotspur, the football team he supports, play the first game of the English Premier League season – but his joy wasn’t entirely due to the upcoming game.
Lawrence was standing. OOFis a gallery dedicated to the art of football that opened last month in a building attached to the club’s stadium gift shop. Some of the works on display seemed to make him as happy as the Tottenham win.
OOF’s inaugural show “Balls” (until 21 November) features 17 pieces of contemporary art using or representing soccer balls. One is concrete, the other is silicone, which looks like it’s covered with nipples.
“I’d like this in my bedroom,” Lawrence said, pointing to Marcus Harvey’s huge bronze of a deflated ball. The artist said in a phone interview that the work can evoke anything. Britain’s fall as an imperial power until the end of childhood.
For Lawrence, though, her appeal was simpler: “Looks like you can sit in it like a sofa,” she said.
Lawrence then took his father upstairs and looked at a piece by French artist Laurent Perbos called “The World’s Longest Ball.” “Looks like sausage!” he said, before smirking for the photos in front of another piece containing a microwaved papier-mâché soccer ball.
Not everyone was very enthusiastic about the exhibits. Downstairs, 71-year-old Ron Iley stared at the ball covered in the nipples of Argentine artist Nicola Costantino. “Lots of garbage,” he said, and went out.
The worlds of art and football don’t necessarily mix. The most well-known recent work combining both, A bust of Cristiano RonaldoThe Portuguese actress who made headlines because she didn’t look like herself at all when she was released in 2017. Other pieces like Andy Warhol’s Pele’s acrylic screenprintsare little more than simple tributes to great athletes.
Art critic Eddy Frankel, who co-founded OOF with gallerists Jennie and Justin Hammond, said he wanted to show that football-related art in England as football is known can be exciting, complex and thought-provoking. “We use football to express ideas about society,” Frankel said. “If you want to talk about racism, bigotry, homophobia, or if you want to talk about community, faith and passion: you can do it all with football.”
Frankel said the UK has kept his passion for football quiet in the art world because “you really can’t get away with getting into both”. That changed one night in 2015 when he went to report at Sotheby’s. auction of a monumental painting By German painter Gerhard Richter. The sale clashed with a game played by Tottenham Hotspur, Frankel’s backed club, so he started watching the match on his phone. He said that soon after, about 15 people behind him bent down to see the view.
“I just said, ‘Oh, so there are people in the art world who care about football like me,'” Frankel said.
In 2018, she launched OOF as a magazine that explores the intersection of her passions. “We thought maybe we could get rid of four issues,” he said. The eighth issue of the magazine, which is published every two years, is out.
Setting up an exhibition space seems logical next step, Frankel said, adding that he initially wanted to open it in a former kebab shop near Tottenham Hotspur stadium, about eight miles north of London’s traditional gallery districts. But when he and his partners turned to the local council for help, they suggested contacting the club instead; They proposed a 19th-century townhouse that sits mismatched outside the club’s futuristic stadium and is attached to a gift shop.
Most of the works displayed at OOF are for sale, with some pieces costing up to $120,000, but the gallery receives far more visitors than most commercial galleries. More than 60,000 fans come to the stadium on match days, and on Sunday, several hundred spectators, most of them Tottenham Hotspur jerseys, stood out from the crowd and looked around.
“We basically run a museum without a museum budget,” Frankel said.
With a mark of the cheek at the entrance, Frankel asks visitors not to kick the art, but not everyone followed suit, Frankel said: “On a recent visit, Ledley King, a former Tottenham Hotspur captain, gave the “World’s Longest Ball.” “A light boot.
Pebros, the artist behind the work, laughed when the story was told in a phone call. “Maybe he doesn’t go to galleries much, so he didn’t know,” she said.
Frankel said the current roster, including famed striker Harry Kane, has not yet visited the gallery. Players were trying to keep social interactions to a minimum during the pandemic.
“Obviously we’re a commercial gallery, so it would be nice to sell some art,” Frankel said. But the real success is if we can get a lot of people through the door and engage them in contemporary art, which they wouldn’t normally do, he added.
Most of the few hundred visitors on a Sunday fit that bill. “We don’t go to galleries if we’re honest,” said 27-year-old Hannah Barnato with her partner. “But it’s interesting. This is different,” he said.
Sam Rabin, one of the three guides at the gallery who talked to his fans about the works, said that this was a common reaction. “I’ve never heard the expression ‘different’ more than when I worked here,” she said.
However, he stated that many visitors, especially children, made a deep connection with the art exhibited, adding that this proved that football and art are not separate worlds as they seem. “Both are emotional experiences,” he said. “Both are valuable experiences.”
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