The Beautiful Game : WORLD CUP ART EXHIBITION · BUCKHEAD, ATLANTA · 2026

12 June - 31 July 2026

  • Four artists. One sport. On view now through July 31, 2026
  • "Some paintings make you feel the game. These ask something harder — they ask you to remember why it ever mattered."
  • The Exhibition The Exhibition The Exhibition The Exhibition

    The Exhibition

    Pelé called it the beautiful game. That phrase has lasted because it captures something true: soccer, at its best, is a form of human expression as immediate and collective as any art form. This summer, Atlanta is a World Cup city, sixteen matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup will be played here. Carousel Fine Art's Buckhead gallery holds something the stadiums cannot: four artists' responses to what the sport actually means.

    The Beautiful Game takes soccer — its iconography, its history, its emotional charge — as a serious subject for painting and photography. The four artists arrive from very different angles: mythological figuration, documentary photography, conceptual portraiture, and crowd-energy painting. What unites them is the conviction that the beautiful game has always been more than a game.

  • Visitors arriving in Atlanta for the tournament will find, in Buckhead, an exhibition that takes the cultural dimension of the World Cup seriously. The Yarrow Maradona photograph alone is worth a detour from any stadium. The Torres canvases will stop anyone who has ever watched a match and felt something they couldn't fully name. This is what fine art does with sports: it takes the feeling and makes it permanent.

  • Alexi Torres — When Soccer Becomes Mythology

    Torres was born in 1976 in Bermeja, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba —a region defined by its agricultural land, its sugar cane fields, and a way of life organized around planting, tending, and harvest. 

    His signature technique: oil paintings that appear knitted, built from tight, interlaced brushstrokes across up to twenty layers,  is drawn directly from the weaving traditions of his agrarian Cuban upbringing. The visual culture of that world surfaces in his canvases as formal language: flesh rendered as woven cloth, light moving through a surface that looks fabricated rather than applied.

     

    In the Game of Life series, he applies this technique to the geometry of a soccer ball, the hexagonal and pentagonal panels that have defined the ball since the 1970 World Cup. The result is doubly charged: one communal object, the textil, woven into the structure of another, the ball. Collective labor forming the image of collective play.

     

    His work is held in the private collections of Will Smith and Delta Airlines, and has been exhibited at the Miami International Art Fair, Scope, Art Palm Springs, and the Houston Fine Art Fair.

     

    GAME OF LIFE — SERIES STATEMENT

    "This series invites a look at life as a shared arena: a field where identity, community, and chance converge. Just as each panel in a soccer ball contributes to its global form, each individual soul contributes to the greater whole.

     

    The interplay of form and pattern becomes a metaphor for togethernes, for how separate lives merge, influence one another, and create something larger than the sum of their parts. Game of Life is a meditation on connection, shared destiny, and the human capacity for solidarity. In a world often focused on separation and division, this series asks us to remember that life is collective, that our victories, losses, and hopes all ride across a common field."

  • The Game of Life Collection

  • David Yarrow — The Photograph That Witnessed History

    David Yarrow: The photograph that changed his life, and outlasted its moment by forty years

    David Yarrow: The photograph that changed his life, and outlasted its moment by forty years

    GLASGOW, 1966 · MEXICO CITY, 1986

    "In the moment after the trophy presentation, when 5,000 Argentinian fans ran amongst the players and press, Maradona — riding high on shoulders — looked straight at my lens."

    David Yarrow was 20 years old, working as a photographer for The London Times, when Argentina defeated West Germany 3–2 at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. What he made that day is now recognized as the third best-selling sports image of all time.

     

    After university, Yarrow spent years in banking and launched a hedge fund, before selling it in 2014 to return to photography full-time. He is now one of the world's best-selling fine art photographers, with work regularly selling through Sotheby's and major international auction houses. The Maradona photograph remains where it all began.

     

    Displayed at Carousel Fine Art in Atlanta during the 2026 World Cup, in which Argentina enters as defending champion, this photograph carries a weight that few works in any medium can claim: it is a document, a portrait, and a fine art object in a single frame.

     

  • Max Steven Grossman — The Library of Legends

  • Soccer WC 26

    Diasec-mounted photograph · 48 × 100 inches · Edition 1 of 5 · 2026

    Grossman studied engineering before earning a Master of Arts in Photography from NYU and the International Center of Photography. His practice is built around a single idea that deepens on investigation: the bookshelf as a form of knowledge architecture. In his Bookscapes series, he photographs real bookshelves — in libraries, shops, and private collections — then digitally stitches the images into composite shelves organized around a subject: fashion, architecture, music, sport.

     

    Soccer WC 26 was created specifically for the 2026 World Cup. At first glance it presents as a photograph of bookshelves. Look more closely. The spines begin to resolve into names: Messi. Pelé. Maradona. Ronaldo. Mbappé. Eusébio. Beckham. Neymar. Harry Kane. Thierry Henry. Platini. Every book is dedicated to one of the sport's defining figures, a library organized by greatness, an archive of the beautiful game rendered as the object that holds knowledge permanently.

     

    The decision to represent soccer's legends as books rather than as photographs or trophies is a conceptual choice that deepens the longer you spend with it. A book about Pelé is not Pelé, it is what remains of Pelé after the body has stopped playing. The bookshelf in Soccer WC 26 is a library of legacies: the sport's hall of fame rendered as the thing that actually preserves greatness across generations.

     

    At 48 by 100 inches in Diasec, face-mounted directly to acrylic glass and backed with aluminum, the work extends beyond peripheral vision at normal viewing distance. The viewer's eye begins to move across the spines, finding names, making connections. This is the experience Grossman designed: a work that rewards both distance and proximity, that holds more information than any single viewing can exhaust.

  • Chance Cooper — The Joy of the Crowd

    LOS ANGELES, 1991 · SELF-TAUGHT
    Chance Cooper

    Chance Cooper

    Crowd theory — the energy of people gathered in shared emotion 

    Cooper is a self-taught painter whose practice is organized around what he calls crowd theory: the idea that collective experience, the energy of people gathered in shared emotion, is one of the most compelling and underserved subjects in contemporary painting. His people-scape works, presented during Miami Art Week, achieve their effect through accumulation: the energy of many faces in close proximity creates a visual rhythm that a single figure cannot produce.

     

    Lotta Life Left is exactly that: a crowd of faces rendered in bold, pop-art-influenced color, celebratory and festive, vibrating with the communal energy that defines the World Cup at its best. It is, by definition, the experience of attending a match, individual humans sublimated into a collective organism, their separate identities temporarily dissolved into something larger.

     

    In the context of "The Beautiful Game," Cooper's Lotta Life Left provides the emotional key that the other works require. Torres mythologizes the athletes. Yarrow documents the historic moment. Grossman catalogs the legends. Cooper gives us the experience of being a fan, the crowd's side of the equation, the human ocean that the game both creates and requires. Without it, the exhibition would be complete but not fully alive.

  • Why This Show, Why Now?

    Atlanta is a World Cup city. The tournament ends July 19. The exhibition closes July 31. The works will outlast both, but this context, this moment, this specific alignment of sport and art and city, will not come again.

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    FOR THE FIRST-TIME GALLERY VISITOR

    You came for the World Cup.
    This is what it looks like on a wall.

    The Beautiful Game is free and open to the public. No art background required. If you've watched a match this summer and felt something you couldn't fully name, Torres named it. If you've argued about Maradona or Pelé or Messi, Yarrow and Grossman settled that argument in oil and acrylic and silver.

     

    Carousel Fine Art's team is here to answer any question, explain any work, and help you find something worth taking home.
    FOR THE EXPERIENCED COLLECTOR

    The acquisition context is singular.
    The window is short.

    A Yarrow Maradona print acquired in Atlanta, during the 2026 World Cup, edition 35 of 40, that is a provenance story a collector will tell for decades. A Torres canvas from the Game of Life series, purchased during the summer the World Cup came to Buckhead, has a specific and unrepeatable context. These are not abstract investment arguments.

     

    The Grossman Soccer WC 26 is Edition 1 of 5, created in 2026 for this moment. Five copies in the world. This is the first. Torres's canvases scale to 96 × 72 inches. Cooper's crowd brings energy that holds across any architectural setting.