.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I want the art to go into real life’ (Esben Weile Kjær)
Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (2020) is a mesmeric stained-glass work by the celebrated Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær. With a practice spanning music, performance, installation and fine art, Kjær’s work is guided by a reciprocity between art forms. Many of his stained-glass pieces are based on photographs of his own performance works. From his studio in Copenhagen the artist preserves ephemeral moments of movement and connection with the aid of a lightbox, transforming photographic prints into clean graphic lines and transcendent planes of colour. The present work captures and extends a fleeting second of Kjær’s Power Play, a performance-based exhibition held at the Kunstforeningen GL STRAND in 2020. Kjær, who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022, has risen to huge critical acclaim in recent years. His works are held in museum collections across Scandinavia. Kjær’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg last year, and will be followed in 2025 by further shows at the Salzburg Kunstverein and Rudolph Tegners Museum, Dronningmølle.
Installed personally by the artist in the window of Ole Faarup’s home in Frederiksberg, the present work’s glass tableau is shaped and reshaped by light. The scene becomes passionate and euphoric when saturated by blazing sun, and softly intimate as the light fades. Working in stained glass offers Kjær a conscious engagement with European art history. For him the medium marks places of togetherness across time, and he looks to the sublime windows of soaring Gothic churches or the brilliant stained-glass domes of Parisian casinos as a precedent for his contemporary iconography of dance and performance. An echo is also felt in these works of Olafur Eliasson’s Your rainbow panorama (2006-2011), the sweeping, kaleidoscopic glass installation which crowns the ARoS art museum in Kjær’s native city of Aarhus.
At the same time, Kjær works within a distinctly Pop idiom. He draws on titans of the movement from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, creating work that replicates the clean lines and glossy veneers of consumer culture and mass media. There is an archival element to his practice, a preservation of the fleeting ‘now’ which churns ceaselessly on amid contemporary society’s relentless torrent of visual information. His work is concerned with selfhood in this new age, exploring how the individual is shaped by and against popular culture and technological advancement. The artist’s stained-glass works become a mirror of our time, articulated through the nostalgia of traditional media. Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND questions the possibility of the individual or private moment, hovering between the intimacy of the stained-glass image and the public spectacle which formed its basis. Kjær’s practice is fuelled by these intricacies and ambiguities of human connection, and by a powerful sense of nostalgia, conjured from the push and pull between private and shared memory.
THE OLE FAARUP COLLECTION
‘I’ve got so much joy out of the art world, and I want to give it back’ (Ole Faarup)
The home of Ole Faarup was a modern-day Kunstkammer. From room to room, the walls were filled with paintings and the floors piled high with sculptures. This extraordinary, all-encompassing visual environment was a convivial setting for a collector who saw his artworks as a family, and appreciated being in their company every day. Among the most admired in Denmark, Faarup’s exceptional collection remains as testament to the vision and passion of its owner.
While it displays a distinctly Danish sensibility, the story of Faarup’s collection is international. His interest in art was sparked in 1960s New York, where he worked for the Danish design company Georg Jensen. Down the road from his office was the Museum of Modern Art. He began to spend his lunch-breaks among the museum’s masterpieces, and to develop the sharp, intuitive eye that would guide him for years to come.
After his return to Denmark the following decade—where he became director of Illums Bolighus, and later took over furniture retailer 3 Falke Møbler in Frederiksberg—Faarup began to build his collection, with an initial focus on homegrown artists. His first major purchase was Per Kirkeby’s Skovsøen (Lake Forest) (1970), which he kept for the rest of his life. Further highlights among the collection’s Danish names include Ejler Bille, Tal R, Asger Jorn and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba.
Some other early acquisitions, however, made way for newer art by younger artists. The collection was in constant motion, active and engaged with the present moment. Faarup had a superb sense of intuition and collected many major artists early in their careers. These included many Young British Artists of the 1990s—Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas, Noble & Webster—and, during the same decade, the painters Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Ofili’s Blossom (1997) and Doig’s Country Rock (1998-1999) stand out among their most iconic and celebrated works, and have graced the catalogue covers of major museum exhibitions to which Faarup lent them.
Amid works that hail from many different countries, a grouping of paintings and sculptures from Germany also emerges as a strong vein in the collection. Faarup’s early purchase of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat—then an artist little-known in Denmark—is yet another example of his forward-looking vision. In more recent years, he acquired works by the up-and-coming Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli, the Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, and the Polish neo-surrealist Ewa Juszkiewicz. Faarup retained his strong interest in contemporary Danish art, too, forging a close relationship with the rising star Esben Weile Kjær.
Faarup never bought art for the sake of investment, but rather was guided by his own personal emotive responses. He also placed great importance upon meeting the artists whose work he owned, recalling memorable encounters with Doig and Ofili, with Ejler Bille, and with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City in New York. Something of an artist’s soul, he believed, resided in their work. Indeed, it is the capacity to convey another human view of the world—whether it thrills and quickens the pulse, or offers an escape from the noise of day-to-day life—that gives art its power, beauty and integrity.
Living among these artworks as his intimate companions, it is little wonder that Faarup regarded his collection with such warmth. With his legacy, he set out to create a fund through which museums can acquire new works by young Danish artists. The Ole Faarup Art Foundation will share his joy with others, and leave his country’s artistic lifeblood all the stronger. While his collection represents more than half a century of deeply-felt passion for art, Ole Faarup always had an intelligent eye fixed firmly on the future.
Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (2020) is a mesmeric stained-glass work by the celebrated Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær. With a practice spanning music, performance, installation and fine art, Kjær’s work is guided by a reciprocity between art forms. Many of his stained-glass pieces are based on photographs of his own performance works. From his studio in Copenhagen the artist preserves ephemeral moments of movement and connection with the aid of a lightbox, transforming photographic prints into clean graphic lines and transcendent planes of colour. The present work captures and extends a fleeting second of Kjær’s Power Play, a performance-based exhibition held at the Kunstforeningen GL STRAND in 2020. Kjær, who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022, has risen to huge critical acclaim in recent years. His works are held in museum collections across Scandinavia. Kjær’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg last year, and will be followed in 2025 by further shows at the Salzburg Kunstverein and Rudolph Tegners Museum, Dronningmølle.
Installed personally by the artist in the window of Ole Faarup’s home in Frederiksberg, the present work’s glass tableau is shaped and reshaped by light. The scene becomes passionate and euphoric when saturated by blazing sun, and softly intimate as the light fades. Working in stained glass offers Kjær a conscious engagement with European art history. For him the medium marks places of togetherness across time, and he looks to the sublime windows of soaring Gothic churches or the brilliant stained-glass domes of Parisian casinos as a precedent for his contemporary iconography of dance and performance. An echo is also felt in these works of Olafur Eliasson’s Your rainbow panorama (2006-2011), the sweeping, kaleidoscopic glass installation which crowns the ARoS art museum in Kjær’s native city of Aarhus.
At the same time, Kjær works within a distinctly Pop idiom. He draws on titans of the movement from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, creating work that replicates the clean lines and glossy veneers of consumer culture and mass media. There is an archival element to his practice, a preservation of the fleeting ‘now’ which churns ceaselessly on amid contemporary society’s relentless torrent of visual information. His work is concerned with selfhood in this new age, exploring how the individual is shaped by and against popular culture and technological advancement. The artist’s stained-glass works become a mirror of our time, articulated through the nostalgia of traditional media. Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND questions the possibility of the individual or private moment, hovering between the intimacy of the stained-glass image and the public spectacle which formed its basis. Kjær’s practice is fuelled by these intricacies and ambiguities of human connection, and by a powerful sense of nostalgia, conjured from the push and pull between private and shared memory.
THE OLE FAARUP COLLECTION
‘I’ve got so much joy out of the art world, and I want to give it back’ (Ole Faarup)
The home of Ole Faarup was a modern-day Kunstkammer. From room to room, the walls were filled with paintings and the floors piled high with sculptures. This extraordinary, all-encompassing visual environment was a convivial setting for a collector who saw his artworks as a family, and appreciated being in their company every day. Among the most admired in Denmark, Faarup’s exceptional collection remains as testament to the vision and passion of its owner.
While it displays a distinctly Danish sensibility, the story of Faarup’s collection is international. His interest in art was sparked in 1960s New York, where he worked for the Danish design company Georg Jensen. Down the road from his office was the Museum of Modern Art. He began to spend his lunch-breaks among the museum’s masterpieces, and to develop the sharp, intuitive eye that would guide him for years to come.
After his return to Denmark the following decade—where he became director of Illums Bolighus, and later took over furniture retailer 3 Falke Møbler in Frederiksberg—Faarup began to build his collection, with an initial focus on homegrown artists. His first major purchase was Per Kirkeby’s Skovsøen (Lake Forest) (1970), which he kept for the rest of his life. Further highlights among the collection’s Danish names include Ejler Bille, Tal R, Asger Jorn and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba.
Some other early acquisitions, however, made way for newer art by younger artists. The collection was in constant motion, active and engaged with the present moment. Faarup had a superb sense of intuition and collected many major artists early in their careers. These included many Young British Artists of the 1990s—Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas, Noble & Webster—and, during the same decade, the painters Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Ofili’s Blossom (1997) and Doig’s Country Rock (1998-1999) stand out among their most iconic and celebrated works, and have graced the catalogue covers of major museum exhibitions to which Faarup lent them.
Amid works that hail from many different countries, a grouping of paintings and sculptures from Germany also emerges as a strong vein in the collection. Faarup’s early purchase of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat—then an artist little-known in Denmark—is yet another example of his forward-looking vision. In more recent years, he acquired works by the up-and-coming Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli, the Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, and the Polish neo-surrealist Ewa Juszkiewicz. Faarup retained his strong interest in contemporary Danish art, too, forging a close relationship with the rising star Esben Weile Kjær.
Faarup never bought art for the sake of investment, but rather was guided by his own personal emotive responses. He also placed great importance upon meeting the artists whose work he owned, recalling memorable encounters with Doig and Ofili, with Ejler Bille, and with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City in New York. Something of an artist’s soul, he believed, resided in their work. Indeed, it is the capacity to convey another human view of the world—whether it thrills and quickens the pulse, or offers an escape from the noise of day-to-day life—that gives art its power, beauty and integrity.
Living among these artworks as his intimate companions, it is little wonder that Faarup regarded his collection with such warmth. With his legacy, he set out to create a fund through which museums can acquire new works by young Danish artists. The Ole Faarup Art Foundation will share his joy with others, and leave his country’s artistic lifeblood all the stronger. While his collection represents more than half a century of deeply-felt passion for art, Ole Faarup always had an intelligent eye fixed firmly on the future.