Somewhere between the sacred geometry of Kazimir Malevich and the muddy poetry of Sunday league football lies the artist known only as Goalie Goes Up—a name that evokes panic in both the penalty box and the gallery, with its reckless pursuit of glory. This is not merely an alias, but a manifesto. A gesture. An abstraction in motion.
To encounter Goalie Goes Up’s work is to be suspended in a moment of potential energy—“like a goalkeeper,” as one critic has noted, “leaving the safety of the line to chase a corner he will never reach.”* England fans know this sensation well: a bold dash, a nation breathless, and then the crushing inevitability of failure. A loop repeated every four years since 1966, with the unyielding optimism of Lear’s fool: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”
The work itself? Think digital paint not flung but placed, rather like limbs in a last-minute set piece. Shapes avoid collision. Lines buckle. Every canvas is a pitch, every mark a movement, yet not necessarily a goal. There’s a tension between aggression and grace, between the measured formation and the wild lunge. You do not look at a Goalie Goes Up work so much as hear it—boots scraping, lungs bursting, the sound of eighty thousand hopes deflating all at once. It’s as if Caravaggio had spent a rainy childhood watching Tranmere Rovers.
Yet, beneath this appearance of chaos lies thought—philosophy, even. In the artist’s rare interviews (delivered in cryptic riddles on annotated team sheets), she suggests that her abstractions are gestures of belief in the face of impossible odds. “I leap,” she once wrote on the back of a canvas, “not to catch the ball, but to remain human.”
This is art not for the trophy case, but for the long journey home. As Voltaire put it, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”—or perhaps, one must imagine Sisyphus leaving safety behind and jumping for a late equaliser in extra time.
The cultural critics, understandably confused, have compared Goalie Goes Up to everyone from Cy Twombly to David Seaman. But such comparisons miss the point. This is not an artist who plays with stylistic coherence. Each piece is a stoppage-time decision. A scramble. A tangle of limbs and lines in search of transcendence. Some fail utterly. Some hit the post. But occasionally, gloriously, the art connects—cleanly, sweetly—with a viewer, and the crowd roars.
England’s record in World Cups (one win, eternal heartbreak) finds strange resonance in this practice. The bold lunge of Goalie Goes Up is a national allegory: hopeful, doomed, noble in its futility. It is Beckham’s red card, Southgate’s missed penalty, Pickford’s fingertips. It is art that remembers every near miss and celebrates them as if they were victories.
What a play Shakespeare would have written, had he focused his skills on football. We can only guess what he would have said, but we know that he knew a thing or two about tragic ambition. Maybe he would have described this art with words he gave to Henry V: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” The goalie goes up—not because he should, but because he must.
And in that absurd, beautiful leap, leaving his own goal asunder, art lives.
*Kingsley Break, Art Listner, July 2024
