Burger King Olympic Basketball 1976

LeRoy Neiman made this painting, Burger King Olympic Basketball, with a lot of energy – I can almost hear the buzzer. Look at the flags around the top of the image and the way that they kind of bleed into the colours around them. Neiman’s got this way of making the paint look like it’s moving, like it’s got a life of its own. The colours are loud and proud. Everything feels super immediate, like he’s trying to capture the speed of the game itself. There's this pink splotch, right by the basketball player's head; it’s just this bright, unapologetic burst of colour that doesn't exactly ‘make sense’ but really animates the whole scene. This feels like a kissing cousin to some of the work of the Italian Futurists, artists like Umberto Boccioni, who were also trying to capture movement and energy in their work. But while they were all about machines and speed, Neiman’s all about the thrill of the game.