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Lot Essay
‘I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words’ (Peter Doig)
Country Rock (1998-1999) is a sumptuous, dreamlike painting that stands among Peter Doig’s most iconic works. Three metres across and two metres high, it is the largest of three monumental canvases he made on the subject of a roadside rainbow—in fact the painted mouth of a tunnel in Toronto, Canada—during the late 1990s. The rainbow gazes like an eye over the white line of a traffic barrier. It is set in a bank of rosy undergrowth that simmers and glows, rising to a horizon of dark, spectral green trees beneath a lavender sky. The painting comes alive in a rich diversity of tones and textures, charged with the elusive sense of place, memory and reverie that defines Doig’s practice. Acquired by Ole Faarup the year it was made, Country Rock has been included in a plethora of major solo exhibitions since, appearing in Glarus, Dublin, Maastricht, Nîmes, Paris, Frankfurt and London, where—in 2008—it starred as the catalogue cover for Doig’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain. The painting was most recently seen in 2015 as part of his large-scale survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
The enigmatic, dislocated quality of Doig’s work has its roots in a life lived on the move. Born in Scotland in 1959, he spent some of his childhood in Trinidad before moving to Canada. Aged twenty he came to London to study art at Wimbledon and then Saint Martin’s, returning at thirty—after another stint in Canada—to complete his MA at the Chelsea School of Art. The 1990s were marked by a swift rise to fame, including a breakout show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1991), his receipt of the John Moores Painting Prize (1993) and a Turner Prize nomination (1994). Living in London during these years, he embarked on something of a ‘Canadian period’ as he sought to come to terms with the country’s formative role in his youth. Distance is important in Doig’s work: he once tried to paint a landscape en plein air in Canada and found it impossible. His paintings instead take shape through second-hand images—found photographs, or his own—that fuel his imagination.
The rainbow, which can be seen to the east of the Don Valley Parkway, is a beloved Toronto landmark. Doig was drawn to its bittersweet aura. ‘A lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate,’ he has said, ‘like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass’ (P. Doig quoted in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract)’, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 139). A local teenager, Berg Johnson, painted the mural in 1972 in memory of a friend who had lost her life in a road accident. He maintained his artwork for two decades in a back-and-forth with local authorities, who continually painted it over in grey, until he was ordered to desist. Officially restored in 2012, it still brightens the journeys of commuters today, who call the road the ‘Don Valley Parking Lot’ for its tedious traffic. Doig took his own drive-by photos of the site, refining Country Rock’s composition across multiple watercolours, oil sketches and etching and aquatint editions.
Invoking this motif under the evocative title of ‘country rock’—the type of music one might hear on one’s car radio in Canada—Doig draws upon personal memories of a particular place. Without knowledge of these specifics, however, the painting still casts its spell. ‘My experience is just the spark’, he has explained, ‘… which makes me think about things that are a part of other people’s experience’ (P. Doig quoted in P. Bonaventura, ‘Peter Doig: A Hunter in the Snow’, Artefactum, vol. XI, no. 53, Autumn 1994, p. 12). The road, a zone of transit from one place to another, has a liminal quality in common with the rainbow. Both propose routes to elsewhere. For Adrian Searle, this territory was more psychedelic than country rock. ‘Road-markings are already a kind of abstraction, and so is the entrance to the subway. It is a black hole … a break in reality, like Alice’s rabbit hole. I can almost hear Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” wafting over from that building’ (A. Searle, ‘Wide blue yonder’, The Guardian, 16 April 2002).
The picture’s enchanted, in-between atmosphere is heightened by Doig’s contrasting painterly techniques. The road-markings and traffic barrier are stark horizontals, their white pigment cutting through the shimmering, diaphanous treatment of foliage and sky. The tunnel itself is an opaque black. Such tensions between manmade structure and organic form animate much of Doig’s work: his ‘Concrete Cabins’ series, begun in the early 1990s, played Le Corbusier’s geometric Modernist architecture at Briey-en-Forêt against the unruly growth of the encroaching woodland. Doig expresses an awe at nature that is Romantic at heart—Country Rock’s golden telegraph pole even evokes Caspar David Friedrich, who placed reverential crucifixes in his landscapes—and tempered by the melancholy of a world where rainbows are painted on concrete.
Art-historical echoes abound in Country Rock. One image Doig had in mind was Edward Hopper’s 1946 painting Approaching a City, whose dark railway tunnel—another peripheral place—is a void of urban anonymity. His palette conjures the saturated colours of German Expressionism and Edvard Munch. The bold tripartite composition, meanwhile, relates to the abstract ‘zip’ paintings of Barnett Newman. In his early painting The House that Jacques Built (1991, Tel Aviv Museum of Art), Doig had drawn consciously upon Newman’s ‘zip’ effect in order to create three strips of contrasting visual texture, enacting an interplay between nature and human presence. He would employ similar three-way divisions in major works such as Daytime Astronomy (1998-1999), Echo Lake (1998, Tate, London), Country Rock and, later, 100 Years Ago (2000). Andreas Gursky’s iconic photograph Rhein II (1999), which depicts the Rhine River in Newman-like bands of grey and green, presents a comparable view of the post-industrial sublime.
Where his paintings of the early 1990s had involved dense build-ups of pigment, often creating ‘screens’ of depicted snow or foliage, towards the decade’s end Doig began a transition to more open and translucent surfaces. ‘I always try to escape my mannerisms’, he has said. ‘… I am always trying to find a way of making something less complicated, more fluent, more fluid’ (P. Doig in conversation with K. Scott, in Peter Doig, ibid., p. 20). This shift is visible in Country Rock, whose lush chromatic veils attain a watercolour-like delicacy. The rainbow runs with a spectrum of fine drips, and soft white splashes bloom on the tarmac. The scrubland sparkles with luminous, blushing hues below the velvet-dark trees, which appear ghostly—almost as if in photographic negative—against the lilac-washed sky. The scene wavers before our eyes like a mirage on the verge of dissolution.
It is this ambiguity—revelling at once in the splendid, mutable actuality of paint and the illusory nature of the image created—that lends Doig’s works their unique magic and mystery. His painting of a painted rainbow points to the mediated nature of postmodern experience, but it also suggests a hopeful entry into another realm, somewhere beyond the surface of the picture. ‘Like ghost stories,’ wrote Peter Campbell of the works in Doig’s 2008 Tate exhibition, ‘they draw on the potency of matters unresolved; it hangs about them like an unearthed static charge’ (P. Campbell, ‘Peter Doig’, The London Review of Books, vol. 30, no. 5, 6 March 2008). Flickering between past, present, fact, fantasy and personal and collective memory, Country Rock is a wistful vision of painting as possibility: as a way of looking at the world we live in, and a place of imaginative escape.
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.
Country Rock (1998-1999) is a sumptuous, dreamlike painting that stands among Peter Doig’s most iconic works. Three metres across and two metres high, it is the largest of three monumental canvases he made on the subject of a roadside rainbow—in fact the painted mouth of a tunnel in Toronto, Canada—during the late 1990s. The rainbow gazes like an eye over the white line of a traffic barrier. It is set in a bank of rosy undergrowth that simmers and glows, rising to a horizon of dark, spectral green trees beneath a lavender sky. The painting comes alive in a rich diversity of tones and textures, charged with the elusive sense of place, memory and reverie that defines Doig’s practice. Acquired by Ole Faarup the year it was made, Country Rock has been included in a plethora of major solo exhibitions since, appearing in Glarus, Dublin, Maastricht, Nîmes, Paris, Frankfurt and London, where—in 2008—it starred as the catalogue cover for Doig’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain. The painting was most recently seen in 2015 as part of his large-scale survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
The enigmatic, dislocated quality of Doig’s work has its roots in a life lived on the move. Born in Scotland in 1959, he spent some of his childhood in Trinidad before moving to Canada. Aged twenty he came to London to study art at Wimbledon and then Saint Martin’s, returning at thirty—after another stint in Canada—to complete his MA at the Chelsea School of Art. The 1990s were marked by a swift rise to fame, including a breakout show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1991), his receipt of the John Moores Painting Prize (1993) and a Turner Prize nomination (1994). Living in London during these years, he embarked on something of a ‘Canadian period’ as he sought to come to terms with the country’s formative role in his youth. Distance is important in Doig’s work: he once tried to paint a landscape en plein air in Canada and found it impossible. His paintings instead take shape through second-hand images—found photographs, or his own—that fuel his imagination.
The rainbow, which can be seen to the east of the Don Valley Parkway, is a beloved Toronto landmark. Doig was drawn to its bittersweet aura. ‘A lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate,’ he has said, ‘like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass’ (P. Doig quoted in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract)’, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 139). A local teenager, Berg Johnson, painted the mural in 1972 in memory of a friend who had lost her life in a road accident. He maintained his artwork for two decades in a back-and-forth with local authorities, who continually painted it over in grey, until he was ordered to desist. Officially restored in 2012, it still brightens the journeys of commuters today, who call the road the ‘Don Valley Parking Lot’ for its tedious traffic. Doig took his own drive-by photos of the site, refining Country Rock’s composition across multiple watercolours, oil sketches and etching and aquatint editions.
Invoking this motif under the evocative title of ‘country rock’—the type of music one might hear on one’s car radio in Canada—Doig draws upon personal memories of a particular place. Without knowledge of these specifics, however, the painting still casts its spell. ‘My experience is just the spark’, he has explained, ‘… which makes me think about things that are a part of other people’s experience’ (P. Doig quoted in P. Bonaventura, ‘Peter Doig: A Hunter in the Snow’, Artefactum, vol. XI, no. 53, Autumn 1994, p. 12). The road, a zone of transit from one place to another, has a liminal quality in common with the rainbow. Both propose routes to elsewhere. For Adrian Searle, this territory was more psychedelic than country rock. ‘Road-markings are already a kind of abstraction, and so is the entrance to the subway. It is a black hole … a break in reality, like Alice’s rabbit hole. I can almost hear Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” wafting over from that building’ (A. Searle, ‘Wide blue yonder’, The Guardian, 16 April 2002).
The picture’s enchanted, in-between atmosphere is heightened by Doig’s contrasting painterly techniques. The road-markings and traffic barrier are stark horizontals, their white pigment cutting through the shimmering, diaphanous treatment of foliage and sky. The tunnel itself is an opaque black. Such tensions between manmade structure and organic form animate much of Doig’s work: his ‘Concrete Cabins’ series, begun in the early 1990s, played Le Corbusier’s geometric Modernist architecture at Briey-en-Forêt against the unruly growth of the encroaching woodland. Doig expresses an awe at nature that is Romantic at heart—Country Rock’s golden telegraph pole even evokes Caspar David Friedrich, who placed reverential crucifixes in his landscapes—and tempered by the melancholy of a world where rainbows are painted on concrete.
Art-historical echoes abound in Country Rock. One image Doig had in mind was Edward Hopper’s 1946 painting Approaching a City, whose dark railway tunnel—another peripheral place—is a void of urban anonymity. His palette conjures the saturated colours of German Expressionism and Edvard Munch. The bold tripartite composition, meanwhile, relates to the abstract ‘zip’ paintings of Barnett Newman. In his early painting The House that Jacques Built (1991, Tel Aviv Museum of Art), Doig had drawn consciously upon Newman’s ‘zip’ effect in order to create three strips of contrasting visual texture, enacting an interplay between nature and human presence. He would employ similar three-way divisions in major works such as Daytime Astronomy (1998-1999), Echo Lake (1998, Tate, London), Country Rock and, later, 100 Years Ago (2000). Andreas Gursky’s iconic photograph Rhein II (1999), which depicts the Rhine River in Newman-like bands of grey and green, presents a comparable view of the post-industrial sublime.
Where his paintings of the early 1990s had involved dense build-ups of pigment, often creating ‘screens’ of depicted snow or foliage, towards the decade’s end Doig began a transition to more open and translucent surfaces. ‘I always try to escape my mannerisms’, he has said. ‘… I am always trying to find a way of making something less complicated, more fluent, more fluid’ (P. Doig in conversation with K. Scott, in Peter Doig, ibid., p. 20). This shift is visible in Country Rock, whose lush chromatic veils attain a watercolour-like delicacy. The rainbow runs with a spectrum of fine drips, and soft white splashes bloom on the tarmac. The scrubland sparkles with luminous, blushing hues below the velvet-dark trees, which appear ghostly—almost as if in photographic negative—against the lilac-washed sky. The scene wavers before our eyes like a mirage on the verge of dissolution.
It is this ambiguity—revelling at once in the splendid, mutable actuality of paint and the illusory nature of the image created—that lends Doig’s works their unique magic and mystery. His painting of a painted rainbow points to the mediated nature of postmodern experience, but it also suggests a hopeful entry into another realm, somewhere beyond the surface of the picture. ‘Like ghost stories,’ wrote Peter Campbell of the works in Doig’s 2008 Tate exhibition, ‘they draw on the potency of matters unresolved; it hangs about them like an unearthed static charge’ (P. Campbell, ‘Peter Doig’, The London Review of Books, vol. 30, no. 5, 6 March 2008). Flickering between past, present, fact, fantasy and personal and collective memory, Country Rock is a wistful vision of painting as possibility: as a way of looking at the world we live in, and a place of imaginative escape.
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.