Patrick Groth, Rodeo Clowns (Bull Fighting), 2022, acrylic, oil, and intaglio ink on canvas, 54 x 38 inches

Patrick Groth
Injury Time

June 26 through August 9, 2025
Opens Thursday, June 26, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 534
534 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce Injury Time, Brooklyn-based artist Patrick Groth’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features a selection of new paintings and opens Thursday, June 26, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.

The works in Injury Time focus on two recurring yet distinct subjects in Groth’s practice: professional soccer players and rodeo clowns. Though these forms of entertainment emerge from distinct cultural spheres, the artist explores how themes of performance, masculinity, and the mechanics of spectacle act as charged symbols in each sport.

In Groth’s depictions of soccer players, painting is both a reenactment and a vestige of implicit memory in an age defined by relentless media consumption. One can readily imagine the artist painting from a cascade of images flickering across a laptop or phone screen, seeking to capture moments of glitch and interruption in the otherwise seamless gameplay. In Injury Time (Chelsea F.C. vs Manchester United F.C.), daubs of saturated pigment hew the originally made-for-television tableau, portraying a supine player clad in blue. The athletes—agile yet anonymized, identified only through the work’s title—emerge as fragmented swaths of color, engulfed by the boundless, radiating green turf. Moments of disruption recur across the series; in Red Card (Hellas Verona F.C. vs Cagliari Calcio) and Red Card (Arsenal F.C. vs Burnley F.C.), for example, Groth captures the rupture of a foul in play. Throughout these paintings, the artist’s impasto brushwork evokes the pixelated shimmer of a laptop screen struggling to process a lagging Wi-Fi connection, eroding high-definition clarity into a coagulated haze. The resulting compositions capture not only the speed and spectacle of mediated sport rendered on the televised global stage, but also the affective dissonance of perceiving the world through a degraded digital lens.

Rodeo clowns, the subject of Groth’s other series on view, trace their origins to early 20th-century bullfighting competitions in the American West, when the rise of aggressive Brahma bulls necessitated a new performer: one who could simultaneously provide comic relief while distracting from fallen and bloodied bull riders. First serendipitously encountered by the artist during a camping trip in Eastern Oregon, and painted in outlandishly ill-fitting denim, mismatched colors, and garish face paint—like the characters featured in the piece Rodeo Clowns—the rodeo clown blends physical prowess with slapstick absurdity, skillfully tumbling, taunting, and catcalling, all while concealing marked bodily risk beneath the theatrical excess.

In these works, Groth employs a monoprinting technique adapted from late Impressionists such as Edgar Degas and Pierre Bonnard. Here, the artist builds image components with stiffened ink on a glass surface, which is then pressed to canvas. This transfer process yields highly graphic forms estranged from their surroundings, as in Rodeo Clowns (Bull Fighting). These detached figures further Groth’s dialogue with his fin de siècle forebears, recalling the harlequin, a comic-servant archetype of commedia dell’arte that subverts authority in pursuit of personal desire. In the hands of an artist like Degas, the figure was imagined as a vessel of introspection and psychological complexity in proto-industrialized Europe. Whereas Degas’s famed harlequins, bathed in soft light, enjoy a visually harmonious relationship to their environment, Groth’s rodeo clowns are awkwardly obtrusive—performers trapped in grotesque theatrics gone awry. Pushed beyond the comic, these clowns emerge as ciphers for social and psychological discord—a visual metaphor for the alienation endemic to contemporary culture, and for the creative agents who mediate such content.

Together, Injury Time treats the sporting arena as a level playing field for formal exploration and critical inquiry. It is within this terrain that Groth inhabits the role of the artist-as-wrangler—at once observer and orchestrator—who intervenes in the visual economy of spectacle to untangle the layered performances at play. Through the act of painting, he confronts dynamics of identity, risk, and public display to expose a sticky pageantry of gendered performance and the coded absurdities that bind it.

Patrick Groth (b. 1987, Boston, MA) 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 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 Bowlish House, Somerset, UK (2022); Kingsgate Project Space, London (2019); Y2K Group, New York, Brooklyn, and Maspeth (2019 and 2018); Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2018); and Disturb The Neighbors, New York (2018). Reviews of his work have appeared in Artnews, AQNB, and Elephant. Groth lives and works in Brooklyn.

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Patrick Groth, Red Card (Arsenal F.C. vs Burnley F.C.), 2025, oil on canvas, 11 x 15 inches

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