Features
Olympic artists on track for London 2012
Some of the UK's most well-known artists have been commissioned to design posters to celebrate London hosting the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Since 1912, each Olympic city has commissioned a poster to commemorate the event. This year, however, the designs of each of the 12 shortlisted artists will also be made available to the public as limited edition prints. The GAC were presented with a limited edition series by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in October 2011. These prints are currently on display at 10 Downing Street. Who are the chosen artists? And how does their artwork reflect the spirit of both the Olympics and the Paralympics?
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A panel (that included Tate Director, Nicholas Serota and Cultural Olympiad Director, Ruth Mackenzie) whittled down a long list of over 100 names to a final shortlist of 12 commissioned artists. Appropriately, the artists were divided into two equal 'teams' of six: one to produce artwork representing the Paralympic Games and the other to create works reflecting the Olympic Games.
For the Paralympics, Fiona Banner has created Superhuman Nude, a text-based work that uses muscular words and phrases to allude to the extreme physicality of an athlete's body. Commenting on her work, Banner says, 'I liked the idea of comparing the athlete to a superhero, with some extraordinary prosthetic gift. Looking at an athlete naked made them powerful and vulnerable at once.
Michael Craig-Martin's Go depicts a stopwatch with the instruction 'GO' written across in red giant letters, designed to convey the immediacy and thrill of excitement as the athletes hurtle out of the starting blocks. In contrast, Tracey Emin's delicate print shows two birds appearing to kiss with the words 'You inspire me with your determination And I love you' written beneath. Emin often uses birds to symbolise freedom and strength – here they draw special attention on the Paralympic athletes. Cleverly playing with abstraction, the large, circular form in Gary Hume's Capital could represent the wheel of a wheelchair or even a large cheering mouth, while the smaller black form resembles a tennis ball hanging in the middle of a green and leafy space.
Big Ben by Sarah Morris is an abstract, dynamic representation of one of London's most iconic landmarks, in which the grids evoke athletic tracks and swimming lanes. Finally, for the Paralympic set of prints, Bob and Roberta Smith have created a characteristic text work, Love, which relays human aspects of the Games – courage, inspiration, love and sweat.
In the Olympics 'team' of artists, Martin Creed's Work No. 1273 presents a stack of brushmarks in the Olympic colours arranged in ascending order to resemble an extended podium. Anthea Hamilton's Divers silhouettes the legs of a female synchronised swimmer as viewed underwater, a, while the swirling mass of blue in Swimming by Howard Hodgkin perfectly evokes the sensation of being in water. Inspired by myth and folklore, Chris Ofili's For the Unknown Runner depicts an imaginary figure engaged in a superhuman sprint to the finish line. Bridget Rileys' Rose Rose and Rachel Whiteread's LOndOn both play with abstract motifs derived from the Games. Riley creates an arrangement of horizontal stripes to suggest swimming lanes or an athletic track; while Whiteread's patterned design of overlapping rings references both the famous Olympic symbol and the marks left on a tablecloth by glasses following an Olympic celebration.