Harper’s is delighted to announce The Most Important of the Least Important Things, Brooklyn-based artist Patrick Groth’s second solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features a selection of new soccer-themed paintings concurrent to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and opens Thursday, June 25, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
In The Most Important of the Least Important Things, Groth’s small-scale paintings compress the spectacle of global sport into intimate encounters, distilling the action of gameplay into simplified forms hewn through loose brushwork. Working from livestreamed footage, the artist gives visual order to fleeting and chaotic moments in which players scatter, cluster, fall, and debate penalties against verdant fields. Here, the matches are suspended at the threshold between movement and pause, turning individual athletes into compositional elements within a total arrangement: bodies with wavering limbs and patterned jerseys are set against field markings that divide the picture plane. As Groth observes, “in a sense what I am watching unfold streaming on my phone is a process that has a lot in common with the process of making a painting.” The resulting works translate the live broadcast into a painterly grammar of compression and interruption, foregrounding the sport’s visual choreography over its competitive logic.
Taking its title from a phrase variously attributed to soccer managers—“football is the most important of the least important things”—the exhibition considers the emotional gravity assigned to a game whose stakes are inconsequential on an existential level. For Groth, the phrase operates as both consolation and justification, accounting for the strange intensity with which players and fans invest themselves in fleeting moments of play. Throughout the exhibition, penalties, injuries, and free kicks become points of friction where gameplay slows into image, allowing Groth to isolate the temporary formations that structure the match. In treating soccer as a field where minor events gather emotional force, Groth positions painting as a parallel arena: a place where small moments are held and made newly consequential.
Patrick Groth (b. 1987, Boston) received an MFA from Yale University in 2015, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at Harper’s, New York (2025); Fahrenheit Madrid, ES (2024); Y2K Group, New York and Brooklyn (2020 and 2018); and Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York (2016). Recently, Groth has participated in group exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles (2026); Untitled, Miami Beach (2025); Bowlish House, Somerset, UK (2022); Kingsgate Project Space, London (2019); Y2K Group, New York, Brooklyn, and Maspeth (2019 and 2018); and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2018). Reviews of his work have appeared in Artnews, AQNB, and Elephant. Groth lives and works in Brooklyn.