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Lot Essay
‘I was surprised by the way the building transformed itself from a piece of architecture into a feeling’ (Peter Doig)
Acquired by Ole Faarup in 1994, Concrete Cabin (1993) is a vivid, deeply textural painting from one of Peter Doig’s most celebrated series. The ‘Concrete Cabin’ works occupied the artist for much of the 1990s. Inspired by an encounter with Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing project in Briey-en-Forêt, France, they depict the building’s Modernist façade as seen through the trees of the surrounding woodland. They form poignant meditations on utopian dreams, mankind’s place in nature and the passage of time. In the present work, the building—bright white, with flashes of blue, purple and red—is glimpsed through a screen of dark greenery and fiery orange tree-trunks. Doig’s thick, tactile impasto charges the forest with life. Globules of white paint, derived from his paint-spattered source photograph, add a further layer of intrigue. The work has been unseen in public since its inclusion in Doig’s major exhibition Blizzard seventy-seven, which toured the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1998.
Completed in 1960, the Unité d’Habitation of Briey—like its counterparts in Marseille and elsewhere—was a beacon of hope and community in post-war Europe. Le Corbusier envisioned a modular system that would allow for a complete way of life in one building, and the distinctive concrete structures became exemplars for what would later be known as Brutalism. By the time Doig visited in 1991, the Unité at Briey had been abandoned. Its contrast with the forest had a powerful emotional impact. ‘I never dreamed that I would end up painting it’, Doig said. ‘I went for walk in the woods on one visit, and as I was walking back I suddenly saw the building anew. I had no desire to paint it on its own, but seeing it through the trees, that is when I found it striking’ (P. Doig in conversation with K. Scott, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 20). Le Corbusier’s woodland setting had proposed an idealised meeting between nature and culture. For Doig, the sight of the architecture’s geometry amid the encroaching branches instead evoked a sense of loss and folly.
Doig took photographs and recorded a video of his approach towards the building, which became the basis of his drawings and paintings. He incorporated the marks and splashes that the printed images gathered during their time in his studio. These abstract, amorphous shapes hover before the tangled trees, adding to the works’ air of mystery and dereliction. Doig had already painted cabins and other modest dwellings—often inspired by his youth in Canada, and masked by foliage or snowfall—but the Unité was different. ‘Whereas other buildings had represented a family or maybe a person somehow,’ he said, ‘this building seemed to represent thousands of people’ (P. Doig, ibid.). For him, this haunting quality was heightened by its proximity to the countless First World War graveyards he had driven through in northern France.
Weaving together painterly, personal and cultural strands of experience, the ‘Concrete Cabins’ have become emblematic of Doig’s practice. Several large-scale paintings from the series were included in his 1994 Turner Prize installation at the Tate, and one is now held in New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. The present work condenses their wistful magic into a jewel-like, richly worked vision, alive with narrative suspense. The built structure is almost entirely obscured by the trees, which impose their own organic verticals and horizontals upon the picture. As in so many of Doig’s works, this screening device also pictures the overlay and transformation inherent to the act of memory—a pictorial whole, or unity, remaining just beyond reach.
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.
Acquired by Ole Faarup in 1994, Concrete Cabin (1993) is a vivid, deeply textural painting from one of Peter Doig’s most celebrated series. The ‘Concrete Cabin’ works occupied the artist for much of the 1990s. Inspired by an encounter with Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing project in Briey-en-Forêt, France, they depict the building’s Modernist façade as seen through the trees of the surrounding woodland. They form poignant meditations on utopian dreams, mankind’s place in nature and the passage of time. In the present work, the building—bright white, with flashes of blue, purple and red—is glimpsed through a screen of dark greenery and fiery orange tree-trunks. Doig’s thick, tactile impasto charges the forest with life. Globules of white paint, derived from his paint-spattered source photograph, add a further layer of intrigue. The work has been unseen in public since its inclusion in Doig’s major exhibition Blizzard seventy-seven, which toured the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1998.
Completed in 1960, the Unité d’Habitation of Briey—like its counterparts in Marseille and elsewhere—was a beacon of hope and community in post-war Europe. Le Corbusier envisioned a modular system that would allow for a complete way of life in one building, and the distinctive concrete structures became exemplars for what would later be known as Brutalism. By the time Doig visited in 1991, the Unité at Briey had been abandoned. Its contrast with the forest had a powerful emotional impact. ‘I never dreamed that I would end up painting it’, Doig said. ‘I went for walk in the woods on one visit, and as I was walking back I suddenly saw the building anew. I had no desire to paint it on its own, but seeing it through the trees, that is when I found it striking’ (P. Doig in conversation with K. Scott, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, p. 20). Le Corbusier’s woodland setting had proposed an idealised meeting between nature and culture. For Doig, the sight of the architecture’s geometry amid the encroaching branches instead evoked a sense of loss and folly.
Doig took photographs and recorded a video of his approach towards the building, which became the basis of his drawings and paintings. He incorporated the marks and splashes that the printed images gathered during their time in his studio. These abstract, amorphous shapes hover before the tangled trees, adding to the works’ air of mystery and dereliction. Doig had already painted cabins and other modest dwellings—often inspired by his youth in Canada, and masked by foliage or snowfall—but the Unité was different. ‘Whereas other buildings had represented a family or maybe a person somehow,’ he said, ‘this building seemed to represent thousands of people’ (P. Doig, ibid.). For him, this haunting quality was heightened by its proximity to the countless First World War graveyards he had driven through in northern France.
Weaving together painterly, personal and cultural strands of experience, the ‘Concrete Cabins’ have become emblematic of Doig’s practice. Several large-scale paintings from the series were included in his 1994 Turner Prize installation at the Tate, and one is now held in New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. The present work condenses their wistful magic into a jewel-like, richly worked vision, alive with narrative suspense. The built structure is almost entirely obscured by the trees, which impose their own organic verticals and horizontals upon the picture. As in so many of Doig’s works, this screening device also pictures the overlay and transformation inherent to the act of memory—a pictorial whole, or unity, remaining just beyond reach.
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.