Dazzling interpretation … Sarah Morris’s Olympics-themed canvas 2028 [Rings], 2008. Photograph: Stephen White

The impending Beijing Olympics have inspired everyone from politicians and activists to global brands wanting some advertising action. But you wouldn’t expect an event of such mainstream appeal to influence the avant garde art world.

Ever the iconoclast, celebrated artist and film-maker Sarah Morris has taken on Olympic history with her stunning show at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. Entitled Lesser Panda after a Chinese brand of low-tar cigarettes, Morris displays her signature square gloss-painted giant canvases, pierced with shards of dazzling colour.

One series of paintings is called Rings and it riffs on the Olympic motif. The famous rings are shot through with glinting pigments, spliced like the segments of a stained glass window or shoved in an intersecting bundle at the bottom of the canvas as though clinging to each other while drowning. The colour harmonies (and clashes) are so sharp they seem to slice the eye.

The series looks at various Olympic years with a historically critical eye: 1912 is painted in an archaic empire colour scheme of faded ochre and prissy coral pink. The rings hang from the top of the painting like the links of a chandelier. In 1972 the rings are patterned in the bright colours that only a cheap, style-resistant decade could have spawned: slabs of sticky yellow and glaring blue, plastic Lego colours. 1968, meanwhile, is whisperingly beautiful, full of muted greys, grey-blue, black and white. The rings hover at the bottom of the painting like ghosts in mist. In other compositions the rings proliferate endlessly, tumbling down the canvas in disco pink and kinky Bentley black, round and bold as nightclub lights. Like the events they describe, they are attractive and tacky, rich and kitsch, simple yet corrupt.