JO Munich / München 1972 Shusaku Arakawa

Shusaku Arakawa brought to Munich what no other artist in the series could: the sensibility of Japan's post-war avant-garde, filtered through a decade spent in New York absorbing Duchamp, Fluxus and the conceptual turn. His work operated at the boundary between image and language, diagram and painting — systems of meaning made visible on the surface of things. Applied to the Olympic emblem, his poster transforms a sports symbol into something closer to a philosophical proposition.

The design is number 9 of 29 in the Artist Series — one of the most international of the Munich commissions, printed by Kroll Siebdruck in Germany using four-colour offset lithography enriched with metallic silver. The shimmering finish gives the surface an uncommon presence, and the signature printed in the plate places it firmly within the Europa edition of the Edition Olympia 1972 GmbH programme.

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