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Lot Essay
‘… snow somehow has this effect of drawing you inwards’ (Peter Doig)
A luminous vision of memory, place and the shifting splendour of paint, Ski Jacket is a majestic work from a pivotal moment in Peter Doig’s career. It was made in 1994, the year of Doig’s Turner Prize nomination: its sister painting, also titled Ski Jacket, was included in the prize exhibition and acquired by the Tate, London in 1995. More than two metres across, the work depicts a ski slope flushed in glowing, auroral hues of pink, gold and blue. Tiny skiers are peppered among conifers and chalet buildings, bringing together the cabins and trees that are among Doig’s most iconic motifs. Snow veils the scene in a dazzling diversity of texture: paint becomes a mist of white powder, a spray of droplets, a glaze of frost, or impasto dots that wink like sequins. This richly layered snowscape dramatises the hazy sensations of remembering, and—through skiing—the slippery, thrilling pursuit of painting itself. Acquired by Ole Faarup soon after its completion, Ski Jacket has been unseen in public since 2012, when it was shown at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg.
Doig’s Turner Prize nomination followed several years of mounting critical acclaim. After graduating from the Chelsea School of Art in 1990, he had been honoured with a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1991, and in 1993 he won the John Moores Painting Prize for Blotter (1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). The period saw him paint some of his most beguiling canvases. In wintry, enigmatic works such as Blotter, Charley’s Space (1991) and Pond Life (1993), as well as the present painting, he used screens of snow to partially veil his images, visualising the fugitive qualities of memory. Many dealt with themes or motifs drawn from Doig’s time in Canada, where he had spent much of his youth. They were sparked by photographs, placing his experience at a further remove. While winter sports had personal significance for Doig—he remains a keen ice-hockey player—Ski Jacket began with a typically indirect source: it is based on a photograph of a Japanese ski slope that his father found in a Toronto newspaper.
The photograph, Doig said, reminded him of ‘Japanese landscape painting, the scroll-like form, with all activities coming down’ (P. Doig quoted in M. Matsui, ‘I Am Never Bored with Painting: Peter Doig, Interview’, Bijutsu Techo, vol. 72, no. 1082, June 2020, p. 186). Like the figures in those paintings, Ski Jacket’s tiny skiers beckon the viewer into the landscape as they dart, glide and crowd among the sprawling trees and snowbound cabins. While Doig had long been interested in tensions between human presence and natural phenomena, he had at this stage made relatively few works that featured people. The dozens depicted here—some of them fully legible, others little more than distant flicks of colour—introduce a previously unseen sense of scale and activity. The psychedelic palette heightens the drama, with blooming mauve and lilac contrasting with cooler blues and pools of golden light.
‘When I was making the “snow” paintings’, Doig explained, ‘I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour.’ These art-historical cues were refracted through first-hand sensory memories. He drew upon ‘the way that you perceive things when you are in the mountains—for example, when you are feeling warm in an otherwise cold environment, and how the light is often extreme and accentuated by wearing different coloured goggles … There used to be these rose-tinted goggles that made everything look as pink as cotton candy’ (P. Doig quoted in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract)’, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, pp. 132, 140). Doig’s ‘rose-tinted goggles’ evoke both an actual visual experience and the transformative lens of retrospection.
While snow was a distinctive element of Doig’s Canadian imaginary, it was also a device with which to picture the white-outs, interruptions and accretions inherent to the act of remembering. He has spoken admiringly of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1563), where ‘the snow is almost all the same size, it’s not perspectival, it’s this notion of the “idea” of snow, which I like. It becomes like a screen, making you look through it’ (P. Doig quoted in L. Edelstein, ‘Peter Doig: Losing Oneself in the Looking’, in Flash Art, Vol. 31, May-June 1998, p. 86). An artist fascinated by moving images, Doig also saw parallels between Bruegel’s work and the ‘snow’ that can beset television screens with poor signal. Gerhard Richter’s squeegeed abstracts and blurred photo-paintings present similar disturbances. Ski Jacket, derived from a found photograph of a distant country, overlays myriad forms of interference and mediation.
Doig emerged in London at a time when painting was out of fashion. Many of his contemporaries, who became known as the Young British Artists, were engaged with conceptualism, privileging the use of sculpture, installation and found objects. In Ski Jacket, the skiers captured something of his resolve to be a painter. The people in the picture, he noticed, were all beginners, trying to stay on their feet: ‘when you start skiing you slip all over the place, yet over a period of time you learn to cope … I think painting is a bit like that. It takes time to actually take control of the greasy stuff, paint’ (P. Doig quoted in A. Searle et al. (eds.), ibid., p. 140). Like a skier, Doig’s own technical brilliance emerges against the intrinsic instability of his medium. Ski Jacket shimmers between abstract and figurative registers, alive with endless change. Variously embodying human figures, impacted ice, fresh powder or blizzard, the pigment also lays bare its material presence as paint on a flat plane.
This alchemy is at the heart of why Doig paints. Like snow and like memory, oil paint transforms, changes state; it can be opaque, misty, frozen in place or fluid and melting. In later years the artist would privilege more spare compositions, concerned with not making a mannerism of the ‘screen’ effects that had defined his seminal works. In Ski Jacket, however, an unburdened exuberance is on full display. The painting is bejewelled with colour and texture, ornate with metaphorical and physical layers. If memories always lie just beyond reach, painting, in Doig’s hands, creates a new reality to hold on to. As he drifts among the places and images of his past, he becomes the orchestrator of another world. ‘Painting is about working your way across the surface, getting lost in it’, he has said. ‘Sometimes I think—shall I have a bit more weather over here? A snowstorm?’ (P. Doig in conversation with A. Searle, in Peter Doig: Blotter, exh. cat. Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin 1995, p. 10).
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.
A luminous vision of memory, place and the shifting splendour of paint, Ski Jacket is a majestic work from a pivotal moment in Peter Doig’s career. It was made in 1994, the year of Doig’s Turner Prize nomination: its sister painting, also titled Ski Jacket, was included in the prize exhibition and acquired by the Tate, London in 1995. More than two metres across, the work depicts a ski slope flushed in glowing, auroral hues of pink, gold and blue. Tiny skiers are peppered among conifers and chalet buildings, bringing together the cabins and trees that are among Doig’s most iconic motifs. Snow veils the scene in a dazzling diversity of texture: paint becomes a mist of white powder, a spray of droplets, a glaze of frost, or impasto dots that wink like sequins. This richly layered snowscape dramatises the hazy sensations of remembering, and—through skiing—the slippery, thrilling pursuit of painting itself. Acquired by Ole Faarup soon after its completion, Ski Jacket has been unseen in public since 2012, when it was shown at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg.
Doig’s Turner Prize nomination followed several years of mounting critical acclaim. After graduating from the Chelsea School of Art in 1990, he had been honoured with a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1991, and in 1993 he won the John Moores Painting Prize for Blotter (1993, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). The period saw him paint some of his most beguiling canvases. In wintry, enigmatic works such as Blotter, Charley’s Space (1991) and Pond Life (1993), as well as the present painting, he used screens of snow to partially veil his images, visualising the fugitive qualities of memory. Many dealt with themes or motifs drawn from Doig’s time in Canada, where he had spent much of his youth. They were sparked by photographs, placing his experience at a further remove. While winter sports had personal significance for Doig—he remains a keen ice-hockey player—Ski Jacket began with a typically indirect source: it is based on a photograph of a Japanese ski slope that his father found in a Toronto newspaper.
The photograph, Doig said, reminded him of ‘Japanese landscape painting, the scroll-like form, with all activities coming down’ (P. Doig quoted in M. Matsui, ‘I Am Never Bored with Painting: Peter Doig, Interview’, Bijutsu Techo, vol. 72, no. 1082, June 2020, p. 186). Like the figures in those paintings, Ski Jacket’s tiny skiers beckon the viewer into the landscape as they dart, glide and crowd among the sprawling trees and snowbound cabins. While Doig had long been interested in tensions between human presence and natural phenomena, he had at this stage made relatively few works that featured people. The dozens depicted here—some of them fully legible, others little more than distant flicks of colour—introduce a previously unseen sense of scale and activity. The psychedelic palette heightens the drama, with blooming mauve and lilac contrasting with cooler blues and pools of golden light.
‘When I was making the “snow” paintings’, Doig explained, ‘I was looking a lot at Monet, where there is this incredibly extreme, apparently exaggerated use of colour.’ These art-historical cues were refracted through first-hand sensory memories. He drew upon ‘the way that you perceive things when you are in the mountains—for example, when you are feeling warm in an otherwise cold environment, and how the light is often extreme and accentuated by wearing different coloured goggles … There used to be these rose-tinted goggles that made everything look as pink as cotton candy’ (P. Doig quoted in ‘Peter Doig: Twenty Questions (extract)’, in A. Searle et al. (eds.), Peter Doig, London 2007, pp. 132, 140). Doig’s ‘rose-tinted goggles’ evoke both an actual visual experience and the transformative lens of retrospection.
While snow was a distinctive element of Doig’s Canadian imaginary, it was also a device with which to picture the white-outs, interruptions and accretions inherent to the act of remembering. He has spoken admiringly of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1563), where ‘the snow is almost all the same size, it’s not perspectival, it’s this notion of the “idea” of snow, which I like. It becomes like a screen, making you look through it’ (P. Doig quoted in L. Edelstein, ‘Peter Doig: Losing Oneself in the Looking’, in Flash Art, Vol. 31, May-June 1998, p. 86). An artist fascinated by moving images, Doig also saw parallels between Bruegel’s work and the ‘snow’ that can beset television screens with poor signal. Gerhard Richter’s squeegeed abstracts and blurred photo-paintings present similar disturbances. Ski Jacket, derived from a found photograph of a distant country, overlays myriad forms of interference and mediation.
Doig emerged in London at a time when painting was out of fashion. Many of his contemporaries, who became known as the Young British Artists, were engaged with conceptualism, privileging the use of sculpture, installation and found objects. In Ski Jacket, the skiers captured something of his resolve to be a painter. The people in the picture, he noticed, were all beginners, trying to stay on their feet: ‘when you start skiing you slip all over the place, yet over a period of time you learn to cope … I think painting is a bit like that. It takes time to actually take control of the greasy stuff, paint’ (P. Doig quoted in A. Searle et al. (eds.), ibid., p. 140). Like a skier, Doig’s own technical brilliance emerges against the intrinsic instability of his medium. Ski Jacket shimmers between abstract and figurative registers, alive with endless change. Variously embodying human figures, impacted ice, fresh powder or blizzard, the pigment also lays bare its material presence as paint on a flat plane.
This alchemy is at the heart of why Doig paints. Like snow and like memory, oil paint transforms, changes state; it can be opaque, misty, frozen in place or fluid and melting. In later years the artist would privilege more spare compositions, concerned with not making a mannerism of the ‘screen’ effects that had defined his seminal works. In Ski Jacket, however, an unburdened exuberance is on full display. The painting is bejewelled with colour and texture, ornate with metaphorical and physical layers. If memories always lie just beyond reach, painting, in Doig’s hands, creates a new reality to hold on to. As he drifts among the places and images of his past, he becomes the orchestrator of another world. ‘Painting is about working your way across the surface, getting lost in it’, he has said. ‘Sometimes I think—shall I have a bit more weather over here? A snowstorm?’ (P. Doig in conversation with A. Searle, in Peter Doig: Blotter, exh. cat. Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin 1995, p. 10).
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.