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拍品专文
‘I find painting to be a way of channelling magic. You can get lost in the paint’ (Hernan Bas)
Two willowy adolescents recline amid a sylvan idyll in Hernan Bas’s Well Aged (2005). The forest floor is strewn with lavender and periwinkle blossoms, and creeping grapevines cling to the tree trunks’ ridges and furrows, bursting into fantastic abstract daubs of chartreuse, crimson, magenta, and lilac fruit. Drunk on the heady scent of ripe flora and wine sipped from a thin-stemmed glass, the couple lie in blissful oblivion. Bas’s celebrated cast of lithe and androgynous young men are typically depicted amid dreamy vignettes of abundant nature. Extending into the twenty-first century the traditional art-historical motif of the figure in a landscape—from the awe-inspiring Romantic vistas of Caspar David Friedrich to the fêtes galantes of Jean-Antoine Watteau—Bas captures his subjects in scenes of tender emotional poignancy and homoerotic encounter. Acquired by Ole Faarup the year it was painted and held in his collection for two decades, Well Aged dates to the artist’s celebrated breakthrough period, following his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial a year prior.
Born in Miami in 1978, Bas spent his earliest years on a remote farm in Ocala, northern Florida. The surrounding national forest looms large in his memories of this time, a wild and expansive landscape of longleaf and sand pines which soar skyward from porous sandhills, spreading their canopies across hundreds of springs, lakes and ponds. ‘I think that overwhelming fear and fascination with the unknown, with what the forests “held”, is embedded in a lot of my work,’ he explains (H. Bas quoted in K. Tylevich, ‘Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission’, Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014). In Well Aged, Bas reimagines this evocative landscape overgrown with a profusion of wild vines, trimmed with jewel-toned grapes. His ornate depictions of nature draw upon the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement, exemplified in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. In one scene from the latter’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s titular protagonist is encountered ‘burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine’ (O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London 1891, p. 30). In Well Aged, fruit mingles with the forest’s floral carpet and Bas’s waifish subjects ease into a similar, trance-like languor.
An admirer of the Symbolist canvases of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, Bas is renowned for his alluring and tactile painted surfaces. In the present work the figures’ forms are finely modelled with charcoal and luminous, delicate washes of pale pink and white paint. Around them, oil paint, acrylic, and gouache is scraped, stippled, flecked and daubed. Bas lays down the ochre-coloured earth in a gritty mixture of sand and pigment, applied in crisp encrustations with a palette knife. Flurries of impasto suggest laden vines whose ripe bunches droop towards the forest floor, and glitter forms crystalline constellations, falling like shafts of sunlight through the overgrowth. The picture plane is characterised by a sense of frenzied excess, as though at any moment the illusion will give way. ‘Paintings that I consider to be successful are always on the verge of falling apart,’ suggests Bas. ‘To me, that’s the fun of it—the imminent collapse’ (H. Bas quoted in S. Margolis-Pineo, ‘Against Nature: An Interview with Hernan Bas,’ Art21 Magazine, December 2011).
Captured amid lavish natural scenery conjured by florid, gestural brushwork, Bas’s ethereal youths evoke Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, whose name is given to festivals of uninhibited and ecstatic revelry. Within the artist’s critical exploration of same-sex love, the allusion to Bacchus in Well Aged becomes a symbol of erotic and social freedom. At the time the work was painted, Bas was thinking about the ambiguities of morality and conceptualising the possibility of ‘hell’ as a place of freedom and abandon, in opposition to the stifling and puritanical nature of ‘heaven’. In Well Aged, Bas draws the viewer into one such dreamlike realm, in which nature, youth and love are suspended in perpetual bloom.
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.
Two willowy adolescents recline amid a sylvan idyll in Hernan Bas’s Well Aged (2005). The forest floor is strewn with lavender and periwinkle blossoms, and creeping grapevines cling to the tree trunks’ ridges and furrows, bursting into fantastic abstract daubs of chartreuse, crimson, magenta, and lilac fruit. Drunk on the heady scent of ripe flora and wine sipped from a thin-stemmed glass, the couple lie in blissful oblivion. Bas’s celebrated cast of lithe and androgynous young men are typically depicted amid dreamy vignettes of abundant nature. Extending into the twenty-first century the traditional art-historical motif of the figure in a landscape—from the awe-inspiring Romantic vistas of Caspar David Friedrich to the fêtes galantes of Jean-Antoine Watteau—Bas captures his subjects in scenes of tender emotional poignancy and homoerotic encounter. Acquired by Ole Faarup the year it was painted and held in his collection for two decades, Well Aged dates to the artist’s celebrated breakthrough period, following his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial a year prior.
Born in Miami in 1978, Bas spent his earliest years on a remote farm in Ocala, northern Florida. The surrounding national forest looms large in his memories of this time, a wild and expansive landscape of longleaf and sand pines which soar skyward from porous sandhills, spreading their canopies across hundreds of springs, lakes and ponds. ‘I think that overwhelming fear and fascination with the unknown, with what the forests “held”, is embedded in a lot of my work,’ he explains (H. Bas quoted in K. Tylevich, ‘Hernan Bas: The Story at the Intermission’, Elephant Magazine, Spring 2014). In Well Aged, Bas reimagines this evocative landscape overgrown with a profusion of wild vines, trimmed with jewel-toned grapes. His ornate depictions of nature draw upon the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement, exemplified in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. In one scene from the latter’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s titular protagonist is encountered ‘burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine’ (O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London 1891, p. 30). In Well Aged, fruit mingles with the forest’s floral carpet and Bas’s waifish subjects ease into a similar, trance-like languor.
An admirer of the Symbolist canvases of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, Bas is renowned for his alluring and tactile painted surfaces. In the present work the figures’ forms are finely modelled with charcoal and luminous, delicate washes of pale pink and white paint. Around them, oil paint, acrylic, and gouache is scraped, stippled, flecked and daubed. Bas lays down the ochre-coloured earth in a gritty mixture of sand and pigment, applied in crisp encrustations with a palette knife. Flurries of impasto suggest laden vines whose ripe bunches droop towards the forest floor, and glitter forms crystalline constellations, falling like shafts of sunlight through the overgrowth. The picture plane is characterised by a sense of frenzied excess, as though at any moment the illusion will give way. ‘Paintings that I consider to be successful are always on the verge of falling apart,’ suggests Bas. ‘To me, that’s the fun of it—the imminent collapse’ (H. Bas quoted in S. Margolis-Pineo, ‘Against Nature: An Interview with Hernan Bas,’ Art21 Magazine, December 2011).
Captured amid lavish natural scenery conjured by florid, gestural brushwork, Bas’s ethereal youths evoke Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, whose name is given to festivals of uninhibited and ecstatic revelry. Within the artist’s critical exploration of same-sex love, the allusion to Bacchus in Well Aged becomes a symbol of erotic and social freedom. At the time the work was painted, Bas was thinking about the ambiguities of morality and conceptualising the possibility of ‘hell’ as a place of freedom and abandon, in opposition to the stifling and puritanical nature of ‘heaven’. In Well Aged, Bas draws the viewer into one such dreamlike realm, in which nature, youth and love are suspended in perpetual bloom.
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.