OLE ZIGER Ball and Sweats (New York Mets), 1980

This original exhibition poster appears to have been created for a 1980s exhibition by Danish artist and photographer Ole Ziger at Galerie Knud Grothe. The poster prominently features a dramatic close-up sports image of a New York Mets player wearing jersey number 27, emphasizing the physical intensity, movement, and visual mythology of professional baseball. The title Ball • Sweats reinforces the artist’s fascination with the raw athleticism, spectacle, and cultural identity surrounding American sports imagery.

The composition is striking in its cropped perspective, focusing almost entirely on the back of the player’s uniform and equipment rather than the athlete’s face. This unusual framing transforms a familiar sports moment into a bold graphic study of color, form, and motion. The saturated blues, reds, and whites of the Mets uniform create a vivid Pop Art–influenced palette, while the enlarged scale and cinematic viewpoint evoke the visual language of advertising, photography, and contemporary realism popular during the late 20th century.

Rather than functioning simply as a sports poster, the work bridges fine art and popular culture, reflecting the growing international fascination during the 1980s with American sports imagery as both cultural symbol and visual iconography. The dramatic cropping and heightened realism suggest influences ranging from photorealism to commercial graphic design, making the piece visually powerful and highly decorative.

Printed in the pre-digital poster era, the work retains the rich color saturation and strong graphic clarity characteristic of high-quality European exhibition posters of the period.

A visually compelling and increasingly collectible poster, appealing to collectors of sports imagery, Pop-inspired graphic art, baseball memorabilia, and vintage European exhibition posters.