Katherine Bernhardt’s contribution to The Art of the Game is entirely fitting with her signature style: monumental in scale yet irrepressibly playful in spirit. The soccer ball stands six feet tall, emblazoned with unmistakable Pink Panther and Diet Coke imagery, spray painted by Bernhardt herself in Jersey City.

Bernhardt has built her distinctive practice around representing everyday consumer products such as Doritos, toilet paper, cigarettes, and Pepsi logos that litter her paintings in carefully constructed compositions. Her work revels in the ubiquitous and cheerfully absurd.

She honed this sensibility over years in her St. Louis studio and growing up in her childhood home, which was, by her own admission, the opposite of minimalist. Every surface covered, every corner full. This influenced her practice. Her canvases prove it: dense, flowing compositions worked on the studio floor, pooled with water, walked across, alive with the evidence of their own making. The messiness is the point.

Bernhardt studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before relocating to New York where an encounter with street art proved revelatory. A simple repeating pattern of ice cream and smiley faces showed her that a visual world could be built from a handful of repeated images. The pattern paintings that followed, dense with her chosen icons, became the foundation of early practice.

The soccer ball is no different. A shape as universal as any she has painted, in her hand it becomes another surface for the same generous, restless attention she gives to her canvases. Here, Bernhardt covers the ball all over with her favored motifs: E.T., Lucky charms cereal marshmallows, and the Pink Panther.

Facilitated in New Jersey by ARTS 14C and curated by a panel that includes the directors of the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Brooklyn Museum, the project was designed for the public realm—the football fan, the passerby, the child dragging a parent across a plaza. Bernhardt’s work fits perfectly within that register. “I like people to laugh,” she said in an interview with Apartamento magazine. “When they see it, I want them to be happy.”