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Lot Essay
‘The only way to really exist is to produce something that has a dialogue with the world’ (Chris Ofili)
A sublime early masterwork by Chris Ofili, Blossom (1997) is an emphatic celebration of colour and texture. Amid a chromatic, dreamlike reverie, the titular figure is poised and seductive, her diaphanous dress billowing in soft curves as she bares one breast. Raising her hands to her face, slender red nails frame bold fuchsia lips and periwinkle blue eyes. She poses amid creeping tendrils of aquamarine, magenta, and crimson, crowned with a single orange flower. The towering, crystalline foliage is conjured with pearlescent, enamel-like beads of pigment, which catch the light like filigree. Receding into the depths of the picture plane, lush vegetation fades into a milky, translucent haze of orange, pink and turquoise resin. Laced with shimmering glitter, the resin spills across the surface, bleeding in thick rivulets towards its edges. Ofili turned the painting as he worked, so that it drips upwards and sideways in defiance of gravity. Crowned in a regalia of painted flora and the artist’s trademark medium of elephant dung, Blossom unites Ofili’s consummate mastery of medium with his critical study of the base, beautiful, sacred and profane.
Blossom was acquired by Ole Faarup in 1997, and has been prominently exhibited under the Danish collector’s stewardship. First exhibited that year in the provocatively titled Pimpin ain’t easy but it sure is fun, Ofili’s first solo show in Berlin, it hung as one among a painted pantheon of powerful black women. The following year it was included in the artist’s seminal first institutional exhibition, which travelled from the Southampton City Art Gallery to the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Whitworth Museum, Manchester across 1998-1999. This exhibition cemented Ofili’s rapidly growing reputation and elicited a Turner Prize nomination. His receipt of the prestigious award that year was a watershed moment; he was the first black artist and first painter in over a decade to win, the intervening years having been dominated by a sculptural and conceptual turn in British art. More recently, Blossom was included in the artist’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain, London, in 2010—for which it served as the poster and the cover of the catalogue—as well as the major survey Chris Ofili: Night and Day at the New Museum, New York, in 2014-2015.
Seeking to examine and extend the possibilities of painting, Ofili’s oeuvre was characterised from the beginning by richly layered and alluring surfaces. ‘That was it for me,’ he recalled of first picking up a brush (C. Ofili quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Tate, London 2010, p. 8). Blossom is an unabashed celebration of paint, in which Ofili’s emblematic painted dots—inspired by the ancient cave paintings of the Motobo National Park in Zimbabwe, and reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal dot painting—gleam atop pooling, jewel-toned resin, through which earlier layers of paint are glimpsed as if preserved under glass. They unfurl in patterns of delicate floral tracery and coalesce to conjure the woman’s rippling gown, softly curving flesh and perfectly coiffed afro.
Blossom is supported from the ground by two pedestals of elephant dung. Further orbs descend along the left-hand edge of the work, studded with jewel-like map pins that spell out its title. Ofili’s use of the material—sourced from London Zoo—was an early and defining intervention in his practice. In 1992, while studying at the Royal College of Art, he received funding from the British Council to attend the Pachipamwe International Artists’ Workshop in Zimbabwe. It was the first time the artist, born to Nigerian parents who had recently moved to Britain, had visited the African continent. In a direct and impulsive effort to bring the landscape into his practice, Ofili affixed a ball of dung to one of his works. He identified a striking aesthetic dissonance between the beauty of the painted surface—at that time he was working in a fluid and modernist abstract style—and the earthy coarseness of the dung.
Drawing on the Duchampian concept of the readymade, Ofili’s prolific use of elephant dung as an artistic medium echoed Georges Bataille’s theory of informe, or formlessness. First articulated in 1929 in Bataille’s dissident surrealist journal Documents, informe sought ‘to bring things down in the world,’ advocating the dissolution of art-historical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’. At the time of the present work’s execution the concept of informe had been newly exhumed. The year prior, a major exhibition by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, had centred formlessness as a lens through which to understand the trajectory of contemporary art history, from Pablo Picasso’s collages of discarded rubbish to Jackson Pollock laying his canvases on the floor and Cy Twombly’s graffiti-like aesthetic. Lifting his works from the wall and placing them instead on excrement, Ofili offered a provocative and timely continuation of informe.
A year before he painted Blossom, Ofili relocated from a studio in London’s Chelsea Harbour to King’s Cross. The roaring sex and drugs trade which neighboured his new studio inspired the Berlin exhibition in which Blossom was first exhibited. ‘I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t work in King’s Cross,’ Ofili reflected on the series. ‘Those works came out of being here. I wouldn’t have made those paintings if I was in Chelsea Harbour’ (C. Ofili quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton 1998, p. 87). Blossom draws on archival black and white pornography images taken from magazines Ofili purchased in shops around King’s Cross, fronted as traditional bookshops. He was playing with the idea of beauty, and of what is allowed or not allowed to be considered beautiful, and the incorporation of bejewelled, resin-coated elephant dung into the work was integral to this project.
The same year Ofili moved to King’s Cross, the British Film Institute—then called the National Film Theatre—at London’s Southbank Centre staged a ‘blaxploitation season,’ showing classic films of the early 1970s genre such as Coffy, Black Caesar, and Mandingo. Distinguished by baffling slang, vitriolic insults, and a cast of black ‘types’, it was the first time many of these films had been aired in Britain, and Ofili went to every showing. Blossom pays tribute to pioneering actress Pam Grier, whose starring role as Blossom in The Big Bird Cage (1972) saw her devise an ill-fated plan to liberate the inmates of a women’s prison. Later roles as the titular vigilantes Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) would make Grier cinema’s first female action star and a face of the blaxploitation genre. In each of these roles Grier wore her hair in a regal, electrifying afro. In her autobiography she later reflected ‘what really stood out in the genre was women of colour acting like heroes ... street-smart women who were proud of who they were. They were far more aggressive and progressive than the Hollywood stereotypes’ (P. Grier in conversation with R. Gilbey, ‘I was part of a female cinematic revolution’, The Guardian, 3 September 2022). With its subject’s name blazoned down the painting’s edge, Blossom draws on the aesthetic of film posters to present a heroic depiction of black womanhood.
Blossom was painted between two icons of Ofili’s practice: the now infamous The Holy Virgin Mary (1996, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the poignant No Woman, No Cry (1998, Tate, London). The exposed breast in Blossom mirrors that of his celebrated black Madonna, drawing provocatively on traditional depictions of the mother and child. ‘When I go to the National Gallery and see paintings of the Virgin Mary, I see how sexually charged they are,’ explained Ofili. ‘Mine is simply a hip-hop version’ (C. Ofili, quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Tate, London 2010, p. 17). Ofili’s monumental depictions of black women played a critical role in his dismantling of aesthetic hierarchies, and his driving desire to reflect his own contemporary black experience. The American painter Kerry James Marshall paid tribute to Blossom’s impact in his painting School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama), which included the exhibition poster for Ofili’s 2010 Tate retrospective amid a rich tableau of art-historical and black cultural references. Powerfully uniting the sacred and profane, Blossom is a visual tour de force, an exemplar of Ofili’s technical virtuosity, and a sumptuous celebration of paint.
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 sublime early masterwork by Chris Ofili, Blossom (1997) is an emphatic celebration of colour and texture. Amid a chromatic, dreamlike reverie, the titular figure is poised and seductive, her diaphanous dress billowing in soft curves as she bares one breast. Raising her hands to her face, slender red nails frame bold fuchsia lips and periwinkle blue eyes. She poses amid creeping tendrils of aquamarine, magenta, and crimson, crowned with a single orange flower. The towering, crystalline foliage is conjured with pearlescent, enamel-like beads of pigment, which catch the light like filigree. Receding into the depths of the picture plane, lush vegetation fades into a milky, translucent haze of orange, pink and turquoise resin. Laced with shimmering glitter, the resin spills across the surface, bleeding in thick rivulets towards its edges. Ofili turned the painting as he worked, so that it drips upwards and sideways in defiance of gravity. Crowned in a regalia of painted flora and the artist’s trademark medium of elephant dung, Blossom unites Ofili’s consummate mastery of medium with his critical study of the base, beautiful, sacred and profane.
Blossom was acquired by Ole Faarup in 1997, and has been prominently exhibited under the Danish collector’s stewardship. First exhibited that year in the provocatively titled Pimpin ain’t easy but it sure is fun, Ofili’s first solo show in Berlin, it hung as one among a painted pantheon of powerful black women. The following year it was included in the artist’s seminal first institutional exhibition, which travelled from the Southampton City Art Gallery to the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Whitworth Museum, Manchester across 1998-1999. This exhibition cemented Ofili’s rapidly growing reputation and elicited a Turner Prize nomination. His receipt of the prestigious award that year was a watershed moment; he was the first black artist and first painter in over a decade to win, the intervening years having been dominated by a sculptural and conceptual turn in British art. More recently, Blossom was included in the artist’s acclaimed mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain, London, in 2010—for which it served as the poster and the cover of the catalogue—as well as the major survey Chris Ofili: Night and Day at the New Museum, New York, in 2014-2015.
Seeking to examine and extend the possibilities of painting, Ofili’s oeuvre was characterised from the beginning by richly layered and alluring surfaces. ‘That was it for me,’ he recalled of first picking up a brush (C. Ofili quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Tate, London 2010, p. 8). Blossom is an unabashed celebration of paint, in which Ofili’s emblematic painted dots—inspired by the ancient cave paintings of the Motobo National Park in Zimbabwe, and reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal dot painting—gleam atop pooling, jewel-toned resin, through which earlier layers of paint are glimpsed as if preserved under glass. They unfurl in patterns of delicate floral tracery and coalesce to conjure the woman’s rippling gown, softly curving flesh and perfectly coiffed afro.
Blossom is supported from the ground by two pedestals of elephant dung. Further orbs descend along the left-hand edge of the work, studded with jewel-like map pins that spell out its title. Ofili’s use of the material—sourced from London Zoo—was an early and defining intervention in his practice. In 1992, while studying at the Royal College of Art, he received funding from the British Council to attend the Pachipamwe International Artists’ Workshop in Zimbabwe. It was the first time the artist, born to Nigerian parents who had recently moved to Britain, had visited the African continent. In a direct and impulsive effort to bring the landscape into his practice, Ofili affixed a ball of dung to one of his works. He identified a striking aesthetic dissonance between the beauty of the painted surface—at that time he was working in a fluid and modernist abstract style—and the earthy coarseness of the dung.
Drawing on the Duchampian concept of the readymade, Ofili’s prolific use of elephant dung as an artistic medium echoed Georges Bataille’s theory of informe, or formlessness. First articulated in 1929 in Bataille’s dissident surrealist journal Documents, informe sought ‘to bring things down in the world,’ advocating the dissolution of art-historical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’. At the time of the present work’s execution the concept of informe had been newly exhumed. The year prior, a major exhibition by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, had centred formlessness as a lens through which to understand the trajectory of contemporary art history, from Pablo Picasso’s collages of discarded rubbish to Jackson Pollock laying his canvases on the floor and Cy Twombly’s graffiti-like aesthetic. Lifting his works from the wall and placing them instead on excrement, Ofili offered a provocative and timely continuation of informe.
A year before he painted Blossom, Ofili relocated from a studio in London’s Chelsea Harbour to King’s Cross. The roaring sex and drugs trade which neighboured his new studio inspired the Berlin exhibition in which Blossom was first exhibited. ‘I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t work in King’s Cross,’ Ofili reflected on the series. ‘Those works came out of being here. I wouldn’t have made those paintings if I was in Chelsea Harbour’ (C. Ofili quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton 1998, p. 87). Blossom draws on archival black and white pornography images taken from magazines Ofili purchased in shops around King’s Cross, fronted as traditional bookshops. He was playing with the idea of beauty, and of what is allowed or not allowed to be considered beautiful, and the incorporation of bejewelled, resin-coated elephant dung into the work was integral to this project.
The same year Ofili moved to King’s Cross, the British Film Institute—then called the National Film Theatre—at London’s Southbank Centre staged a ‘blaxploitation season,’ showing classic films of the early 1970s genre such as Coffy, Black Caesar, and Mandingo. Distinguished by baffling slang, vitriolic insults, and a cast of black ‘types’, it was the first time many of these films had been aired in Britain, and Ofili went to every showing. Blossom pays tribute to pioneering actress Pam Grier, whose starring role as Blossom in The Big Bird Cage (1972) saw her devise an ill-fated plan to liberate the inmates of a women’s prison. Later roles as the titular vigilantes Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) would make Grier cinema’s first female action star and a face of the blaxploitation genre. In each of these roles Grier wore her hair in a regal, electrifying afro. In her autobiography she later reflected ‘what really stood out in the genre was women of colour acting like heroes ... street-smart women who were proud of who they were. They were far more aggressive and progressive than the Hollywood stereotypes’ (P. Grier in conversation with R. Gilbey, ‘I was part of a female cinematic revolution’, The Guardian, 3 September 2022). With its subject’s name blazoned down the painting’s edge, Blossom draws on the aesthetic of film posters to present a heroic depiction of black womanhood.
Blossom was painted between two icons of Ofili’s practice: the now infamous The Holy Virgin Mary (1996, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the poignant No Woman, No Cry (1998, Tate, London). The exposed breast in Blossom mirrors that of his celebrated black Madonna, drawing provocatively on traditional depictions of the mother and child. ‘When I go to the National Gallery and see paintings of the Virgin Mary, I see how sexually charged they are,’ explained Ofili. ‘Mine is simply a hip-hop version’ (C. Ofili, quoted in Chris Ofili, exh. cat. Tate, London 2010, p. 17). Ofili’s monumental depictions of black women played a critical role in his dismantling of aesthetic hierarchies, and his driving desire to reflect his own contemporary black experience. The American painter Kerry James Marshall paid tribute to Blossom’s impact in his painting School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama), which included the exhibition poster for Ofili’s 2010 Tate retrospective amid a rich tableau of art-historical and black cultural references. Powerfully uniting the sacred and profane, Blossom is a visual tour de force, an exemplar of Ofili’s technical virtuosity, and a sumptuous celebration of paint.
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.