Eddy Frankel is Time Out London's art and culture editor, a critic who spent years keeping his two passions — contemporary art and football — in separate compartments. Then he realised more people in the art world cared about football than he had expected. In 2018, he teamed up with London gallerists Justin and Jennie Hammond and published the first issue of OOF, a biannual magazine exploring the relationship between art and the sport. The first issue featured an interview with painter Rose Wylie and pieces on Chris Ofili and Leo Fitzmaurice. Eight issues and counting later, the magazine has become a genuine cultural institution.
In July 2021, after three years of curating exhibitions across London, OOF opened its first permanent gallery in Warmington House, a Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse in the grounds of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Creative Review called it an unpretentious entry point into contemporary art. The gallery is free and open to everyone — football fans wander in curiously from the stadium tour, art lovers visit more deliberately. The inaugural exhibition, Balls, featured twisted and manipulated football sculptures by Sarah Lucas, Marcus Harvey, and Hank Willis Thomas alongside rising talents like Lindsey Mendick and Dominic Watson. A winter 2025 show dedicated to Roger Mayne's iconic 1950s street football photography drew widespread praise.
Frankel has described the project's core tension simply: liking sport can make you feel like an uncultured brute, while liking art can make you feel like a museum-obsessed outsider. OOF exists in the overlap, using football's rich visual culture — shirts, stadiums, bodies in motion, crowd rituals — as raw material for serious contemporary art. For a kid in N17 who thinks art isn't for them, a gallery at their football ground might be the gateway that changes everything.
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