NEW YORK, NY.- Plus Ultra is Brian Alfred’s seventh solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery. Timed to coincide with the 2026 FIFA World Cup, being hosted across North America and culminating with the final in the New York area, the exhibition brings together a new body of paintings and a new animation exploring the imagery, spectacle, and collective experience of sports.

Alfred has teamed up with Adidas, a foundational partner of the FIFA World Cup, to create a limited edition soccer jersey for the exhibition. The edition of 75 jerseys features the details of Plus Ultra, with customizable patches relating to diverse collectives within both the art and soccer worlds that can be added during the exhibition opening. Each jersey purchase comes with a complimentary, editioned zine specially created for the exhibition.

For this exhibition, GRIMM Artisanal Ales—a frequent creative partner of the artist—debuts a limited-edition light IPA.

In mid-July, the gallery will host a private panel discussion featuring FC Bayern Munich. As a prominent representative of Germany’s premier football division, the club’s panelists will gather within the immersive environment of Alfred’s exhibition to explore the significance of their league and the FIFA World Cup, concluding with a question-and-answer session for those in attendance.

Alfred centers the show on sports imagery as a mode to explore its interpersonal, aesthetic, and emotional role inherent to competition and fandom. As a longtime player and co-founder of Triboro United Soccer Club, a non-profit youth soccer club based in Brooklyn and Queens that provides over 25% of players with scholarships to play soccer, Alfred is deeply familiar with the culture and rituals of the game.

Stadiums, athlete portraits, jubilant celebrations, and moments of anticipation are distilled into his signature graphic language of abstract forms and bold fields of color. The resulting compositions evoke a peculiar tension between stillness and excitement, drawing equally from Pop art and Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

In an essay accompanying the exhibition, cultural writer Samantha Chen observes, “Alfred’s works omit and omit again, only to circle back to this sense of perpetual anticipation. We are repeatedly brought into scenes on the cusp of something - empty stadiums waiting for gameplay, confetti that hangs midair, crowds that churn restlessly - and asked to consider what it means to stay at the threshold forever. Here, hope springs eternal; everything is possible, and one cannot lose a game that has yet to begin. Alfred insists there is meaning to be found in the sustained, attentive act of moving continuously towards something, to returning to the threshold as practice.”





Brian Alfred (b. 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA and his Master of Fine Arts in 1999 from Yale University, New Haven, CT. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Salon 94 Video Wall, New York, NY; and the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN. In 2024, the Williamsburg Biannual, Brooklyn, NY presented a retrospective of his work.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, among others.

Alfred’s work can be found in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Cleveland Clinic Art Program, Lyndhurst, OH; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Alfred is the host of “SOUND & VISION,” a podcast featuring conversations with artists and musicians about the creative process. Guests have included Diana Al-Hadid, Jules de Balincourt, Inka Essenhigh, Dominique Fung, Daniel Heidkamp, Ridley Howard, Kahlil Robert Irving, Byron Kim, Hein Koh, Chris Martin, Tony Matelli, Leeza Meksin, Hilary Pecis, James Siena, Sarah Slappey, Alexandria Smith, Fred Tomaselli, and Chloe Wise.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.