11 of the most striking images from the Winter Olympics

7. Mass and motion

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Switzerland’s Briar Schwaller-Huerlemann, transformed by a photographer’s lens into smeared lines of speed accelerating behind the carefully considered thrust of a polished curling stone, appears to have become one with the rock itself, competing in a mixed doubles match against Canada on the fourth day of the Games. Their consciousnesses have merged. Such a dissolution of matter in the mind, and vice versa, reflects the liquefaction of mass and motion achieved by Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), a work that is as much philosophical as it is physical.

8. Human height

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Constant between grace and gravity, between determined control and calm surrender to the laws of nature, the image of Belarusian-born Anastasia Andreyanava of the Individual Neutral Athlete Team (Russian and Belarusian individual athletes), competing in freestyle aerial skiing training on the eighth day of the Games (February 14) at Livigno Snow Park, appears to test the limits of human flight. Isolated in space, weightless yet accelerating, as if transformed by the creak of speed and icy air into pure aerodynamic form, its dramatic suspension calls to mind 20th-century Italian Dalmatian artist Tullio Cralli’s painting “aeropittural” from 1939, Before the Parachute Opens, which also fuses the geometry of form and flight.

9. Dignity in ruin

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Images of American skater Ilya Malinin, whose acrobatic backflips thrilled fans and judges, falling onto the ice during the men’s singles freestyle competition on the seventh day of the Games in Milan, reveal his dignity in the shadow of devastation. With a twisted torso and arms resting on the white marble surface, Malinin’s collapsed pose recalls that of a Roman statue of a dying gladiator (a 2nd-century BC copy of a lost Greek sculpture from a century earlier), which wonderfully captures the awkward pivots and turns of a muscular mind grappling with defeat.

10. Floating in space

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The image of South Korean skater Jeonhui Kim competing in the halfpipe qualifying rounds on the fifth day of the Games at the Livigno Snow Park – his upside-down body crouched under his board, eternally fixed in the freezing snowfall – captures a sense of exhilarating propulsion. Suspending weightlessly under the brand name “NITRO”, emblazoned on his nameplate, and surrounded by a dense sparkle of luminous crystals, the athlete appears almost like a floating molecule, evaporating in a veil of scattered elements. The choreographed suspension of color and energy evokes the exquisite shattering of shape and form in Jackson Pollock’s exuberant enamel masterpieces.

11. Casting shadows

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Shadows have a way of mechanizing movement. Faceless in the Dark, a person stuck in the shadows often seems rooted in an archetypal form – a set of boundaries that transcend boundaries in one way or another. Such is the power of the multinational photo of the athletes taken on the third day of the Games at the Tesero cross-country skiing course in Lago di Tesero (Val di Fiemme). Casting shadows, these stark but indistinct shapes remind us of the lines of future experiments in abstracting power from form. In the 1913 painting by Italian modernist Giacomo Balla, abstract speed, darkness and light are cogs of a color machine that moves beyond movement.

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