110 Hurdles

110 Hurdles is a contemporary Japanese print by Hideo Takeda, dated 2020 and produced as part of the artist's Olympic-themed series of sport subjects. Born in 1948, Takeda has been one of the most internationally recognized Japanese illustrators and printmakers of his generation, with a career built on a distinctive caricatural style that combines bold contour, lively color, and an inheritance from [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) and manga draftsmanship redirected toward a contemporary subject vocabulary. The print depicts the 110-meter hurdles, one of the classical track-and-field events of the modern Summer Olympics, in which a runner negotiates ten evenly spaced barriers along a 110-meter straight course. The composition turns on the athlete's airborne leap over a hurdle, a moment whose visual drama Takeda's caricatural line is well suited to register, with the body's elongation and the hurdle's planar form arranged to maximum graphic impact. The 2020 date situates the print in the artist's Olympic-themed body of work made around the Tokyo Olympics, which had been originally scheduled for that year and were ultimately held in 2021 because of the global pandemic, a context that gave Japanese artists particular motivation to engage Olympic subjects from local viewpoints. Within his career, the print belongs to a sustained pattern of sport-related work that has run parallel to Takeda's historical, theatrical, and animal subjects across many decades. The print is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hideo-takeda-110-hurdles), which preserves a record of the design under the artist's name.