JO Munich / München 1972 Peter Philipps - Open Edition

Peter Phillips was the Pop artist. Trained at the Royal College of Art alongside Hockney and Allen Jones, obsessed with the visual language of commercial reproduction, halftone screens, mechanical print. For Munich he turned all of that to the Games themselves: a hurdler mid-stride, rendered in the Ben-Day dot matrix of newspaper photography, wearing the number 72 on his bib — the athlete and the year are one and the same. Behind him, his own ghost-image looms larger, a double exposure of effort and memory.

The composition layers its elements with Pop precision: horizontal track stripes in terracotta, a diamond frame enclosing a target in yellow and blue, the whole image hovering between sports photography and graphic design. It is the only poster in the Munich series that makes its own reproduction technique part of the meaning — and one of the most contemporary-looking fifty years on.

This piece is sold unframed, carefully rolled and shipped in a rigid tube to ensure it arrives in pristine condition.