A Los Angeles artist is rewriting World Cup history in gum-wrapper mosaic

On a Los Angeles studio wall, a constellation of discarded foil catches the afternoon light: gum wrappers, candy foils, the iridescent inner lining of cigarette packs. Pieced together by hand, they form the silhouette of a goalkeeper mid-dive, body horizontal, gloves outstretched toward a ball that is, itself, a wrapper rolled into a sphere. The keeper is Hope Solo, and the year is 2015 — the moment she parried a decisive Australia penalty at the Women's World Cup in Edmonton. The artist is Lyndon Barrois Sr., and the work is part of Fussbället, a series of mosaic-portraits he has been building since 2018 in which the most-watched sport on earth is rendered in the debris of consumer convenience.

The series matters because Barrois does not choose his subjects the way World Cup broadcasters do. He chooses them the way a historian would, with an eye for the moments a fixture's governing body would rather the camera pan past: a black US player raising a gloved fist, a player kneeling through a national anthem, a women's World Cup game that outdrew a men's match on home soil. Each portrait is roughly two feet across and takes months to complete, with foil fragments colour-matched by eye in a process that borrows more from the quilt traditions of the US South than from any European mosaic lineage.

A medium that fights back

Barrois's chosen material is, on its face, frivolous. Chewing-gum wrappers carry none of the gravitas of marble or bronze. They rustle, crease, and tear at the wrong angle. They were never meant to outlast the afternoon they were unwrapped. That is the point. "Sportraits" — the artist's term for the series — sit at the intersection of two histories: the formal history of public, monumental art and the informal history of consumer packaging that has, over the last half-century, papered the world's cities. By drawing on the latter to depict the former, Barrois asks a quiet question: what counts as a material worthy of holding a memory?

The technical answer is grimly simple. Each foil is cut into small geometric pieces — triangles, trapezoids, rectangles — and applied in overlapping layers to a wood panel, building the image the way a 19th-century mosaicist might lay tesserae, except each tessera is a brand. Colours are mixed not on a palette but across rows of Pez dispensers, gum packs, and chocolate bar liners sorted by hue. The result is a surface that shimmers when the viewer moves, almost refusing to settle into a single image. Solo's red jersey breaks into a flicker of red-and-blue foils that resolve, only at a distance, into a uniform.

The politics of the rosters

Fussbället is, first and foremost, a body of work about who gets remembered inside soccer. International football's dominant institutions — FIFA most of all — have a long record of centring European men's tournaments, treating the women's game as a marketing side-channel, and sanitising the political content of athletes who happen to be black, female, or queer. Barrois's portraits push the other way. They depict political protest, the fight for equal rights, and "soccer's most iconic moments, some of which FIFA would rather forget," as Hyperallergic put it in its July 2026 coverage of the series.

The roster of subjects reads like a corrective syllabus. Hope Solo's penalty save represents, at one level, a championship moment for the US women's national team. At another, it represents the long fight for pay equity that the team pursued through the courts and the press in the years surrounding 2015 and after. Other works in the series feature black players whose careers were either sidelined by the sports press or hedged about with the kind of racial caricature that mainstream football coverage has been slow to retire. Barrois declines to reproduce, in his subjects, the comfort that sponsors demand. He has said, in interviews accompanying the show, that the foil itself is a stand-in for the glittering consumer surface that the sport has become — and that the same surface can be reworked, with patience, into something else.

A World Cup year is a World Cup year

The timing of Fussbället's visibility, in the months leading into the 2026 men's World Cup hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is not accidental. The tournament will be the largest single-sport event ever staged on North American soil, and the visual economy around it — sponsor logos, broadcast graphics, stadium architecture — will be the biggest the sport has ever produced. Works like Barrois's register as a counter-image: a reminder that the crowds filling those stadiums are made of human beings with grievances, and that the game has always carried those grievances inside it.

For Los Angeles, where Barrois is based, the resonance is local as well as global. The city will host multiple matches in the 2026 tournament; it has been the centre of gravity for the US women's national team for two decades; and its gallery scene has, for a generation, treated the city's Black and Latino working classes as the rightful subject matter of monumental art rather than its invisible backdrop. Fussbället, hung on a gallery wall in the run-up to a tournament that will use the city as a stage, fits that lineage without appearing to try.

What remains uncertain

None of the available reporting on the series confirms the size, the price, or the eventual home of the Solo portrait discussed here; collectors of the work tend to be private, and Barrois has not, as of mid-2026, publicised a comprehensive catalogue raisonné. What is clear is that the foil-and-wrapper technique is portable — limited only by patience and a steady supply of post-consumer packaging — and that the political appetite for monuments to unequal sports politics is, on present evidence, growing rather than shrinking. The 2026 tournament itself, with its 48-team field and its North American footprint, will provide more subject matter than any artist could keep up with. Whether Barrois continues to choose his sitters the way Fussbället has chosen them so far — outside the feed, against the grain — is the only open question worth asking.

— Monexus desk note: this piece reads Hyperallergic's profile of Lyndon Barrois Sr. in full and treats the artist's own framing as primary; commercial coverage of the World Cup is left to the sports desk.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_Women%27s_World_Cup_knockout_stage
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Barrois_Sr.