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Lot Essay
‘It is just daily life that interests me, all those days that just go on. It is in them that great events take place, right in front of us’ (Karin Mamma Andersson)
In Hon (She) (2013), Karin Mamma Andersson revels in the slipperiness of paint and memory, and the monumentality of ordinary moments. Dominating the composition, a lone female figure looks down towards a swathe of fabric held in her hands. Her hair is tied in a low ponytail, which curves gently into the nape of her neck. Painted in black, she seems removed from the delicately technicolour scene which unfolds beyond her: under a mauve sky, a regiment of towering birch trees follows the craggy contours of a rockface which descends, in impasto crests and hollows of raw panel, to meet a body of water below. Gesturally painted, the landscape might exist only in the hazy recesses of the woman’s memory. Yet she is tethered to the scene by the rays of a setting sun, which illuminate the trees and fleck the water and sky with yellow, crimson, and royal purple, and glint, too, on the crown of her head and the round white face of her watch. An inveterate ‘painter’s painter’, Andersson’s breakthrough came in 2003 when she exhibited as part of the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Painted a decade later and acquired by Ole Faarup that same year, Hon followed a host of highly acclaimed institutional surveys of the artist’s work, including at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007) and the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2010). In 2021, Andersson was the subject of a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
Painted in oil on wood panel, the plasticity of Hon is integral to the work. Andersson describes oil paint as a ‘tensile’ medium; like memory, it is amorphous and pliable. By turns breathy and viscous, it hovers precariously upon the coarse wood surface—visible through broad passages of the picture plane—as though at any moment the illusion it conjures will collapse. The panel itself is poplar, a low-density and finely grained hardwood whose erratic growth patterns are impervious to dendrochronology: the wood assumes an active role in this temporally elusive tableau. Andersson works the panel with rough chisels to evoke rippling water and craggy terrain, countering the delicacy of her brushwork with a tactile and visible weight. The artist originates her unsparing use of black paint—she hand-mixes matte, velvety blacks with burnt umber and cobalt blue, achieving a more vivid colour than can be purchased off the shelf—in the stark visual impact of Japanese woodblock prints. With its graphic, linear quality and tactile grooves and grain, Hon draws on the aesthetic of woodblock printing and its suggestive allusions of a doubled or mirrored reality.
Andersson’s landscapes are typically inspired by archival black and white photographs of Hälsingland, a province in northern Sweden close to her own hometown of Luleå. Sparsely populated, mountainous, and carpeted by dense forest, Andersson identifies a rich psychological potency and temporal ambiguity—the sun barely sets in midsummer, nor rises in midwinter—in this familiar landscape. Black and white photography offers a point of entry into the work from which she might later depart, to draw on disparate sources or her own imagination. She believes that each work contains an element of self-portraiture. ‘You draw from your own well,’ she suggests. ‘Where else would you draw from? It never runs dry’ (M. Andersson in conversation with M. Laurberg, in Mamma Andersson. Humdrum Days, exh. cat. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk 2021, p. 22).
In paintings such as Hon, Andersson imbues the Romantic terrains of Caspar David Friedrich with the emotional isolation of Edward Hopper, extending a singularly Nordic sensibility in which the human condition is examined through sparse and psychologically charged topographies. As an art student in Stockholm, Andersson worked as a museum guard at the Moderna Museet. The Swedish landscape tradition of artists such as Karl Fredrik Hill and Dick Bengtsson was highly formative—of the latter she writes ‘it is impossible to place him, and a venture into his domain is a reckless adventure. But it is a voyage within a frame’ (M. Andersson, ‘A Voyage Inside a Frame’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, online). Andersson’s porous paintings are similarly elusive, so that the ‘frame’ remains critical; the borders of her picture planes anchor the viewer amid evocative and unreal worlds.
Alongside contemporaries such as Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, and Marlene Dumas, Andersson’s oeuvre is shaped by an interrogation of the image. Her paintings are not arbiters of truth but a point of entrance into the vast, murky shores of human memory and the landscapes onto which it latches. Hon feels strikingly cinematic, as though imminently the camera will pan out, and the interior world of the protagonist will be juxtaposed with the vastness of the world she inhabits. Indeed, Andersson’s rich corpus of ordinary domestic interiors, still lifes, and rugged Swedish landscapes forms a kind of painterly noir. ‘I always used to think I would work with film,’ she reflects. ‘I feel I’ve succeeded, because that’s what I do, in a way’ (M. Andersson in conversation with L. Norén, in Mamma Andersson, exh. cat. Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2007, n.p.). Like a film, Hon invites the viewer to enter a new realm, a pictorial ‘elsewhere’, in which memory and time—symbolised by the gleaming, blank watch-face at the centre of the composition—slip, stretch, and are suspended.
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.
In Hon (She) (2013), Karin Mamma Andersson revels in the slipperiness of paint and memory, and the monumentality of ordinary moments. Dominating the composition, a lone female figure looks down towards a swathe of fabric held in her hands. Her hair is tied in a low ponytail, which curves gently into the nape of her neck. Painted in black, she seems removed from the delicately technicolour scene which unfolds beyond her: under a mauve sky, a regiment of towering birch trees follows the craggy contours of a rockface which descends, in impasto crests and hollows of raw panel, to meet a body of water below. Gesturally painted, the landscape might exist only in the hazy recesses of the woman’s memory. Yet she is tethered to the scene by the rays of a setting sun, which illuminate the trees and fleck the water and sky with yellow, crimson, and royal purple, and glint, too, on the crown of her head and the round white face of her watch. An inveterate ‘painter’s painter’, Andersson’s breakthrough came in 2003 when she exhibited as part of the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Painted a decade later and acquired by Ole Faarup that same year, Hon followed a host of highly acclaimed institutional surveys of the artist’s work, including at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007) and the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2010). In 2021, Andersson was the subject of a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
Painted in oil on wood panel, the plasticity of Hon is integral to the work. Andersson describes oil paint as a ‘tensile’ medium; like memory, it is amorphous and pliable. By turns breathy and viscous, it hovers precariously upon the coarse wood surface—visible through broad passages of the picture plane—as though at any moment the illusion it conjures will collapse. The panel itself is poplar, a low-density and finely grained hardwood whose erratic growth patterns are impervious to dendrochronology: the wood assumes an active role in this temporally elusive tableau. Andersson works the panel with rough chisels to evoke rippling water and craggy terrain, countering the delicacy of her brushwork with a tactile and visible weight. The artist originates her unsparing use of black paint—she hand-mixes matte, velvety blacks with burnt umber and cobalt blue, achieving a more vivid colour than can be purchased off the shelf—in the stark visual impact of Japanese woodblock prints. With its graphic, linear quality and tactile grooves and grain, Hon draws on the aesthetic of woodblock printing and its suggestive allusions of a doubled or mirrored reality.
Andersson’s landscapes are typically inspired by archival black and white photographs of Hälsingland, a province in northern Sweden close to her own hometown of Luleå. Sparsely populated, mountainous, and carpeted by dense forest, Andersson identifies a rich psychological potency and temporal ambiguity—the sun barely sets in midsummer, nor rises in midwinter—in this familiar landscape. Black and white photography offers a point of entry into the work from which she might later depart, to draw on disparate sources or her own imagination. She believes that each work contains an element of self-portraiture. ‘You draw from your own well,’ she suggests. ‘Where else would you draw from? It never runs dry’ (M. Andersson in conversation with M. Laurberg, in Mamma Andersson. Humdrum Days, exh. cat. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk 2021, p. 22).
In paintings such as Hon, Andersson imbues the Romantic terrains of Caspar David Friedrich with the emotional isolation of Edward Hopper, extending a singularly Nordic sensibility in which the human condition is examined through sparse and psychologically charged topographies. As an art student in Stockholm, Andersson worked as a museum guard at the Moderna Museet. The Swedish landscape tradition of artists such as Karl Fredrik Hill and Dick Bengtsson was highly formative—of the latter she writes ‘it is impossible to place him, and a venture into his domain is a reckless adventure. But it is a voyage within a frame’ (M. Andersson, ‘A Voyage Inside a Frame’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, online). Andersson’s porous paintings are similarly elusive, so that the ‘frame’ remains critical; the borders of her picture planes anchor the viewer amid evocative and unreal worlds.
Alongside contemporaries such as Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, and Marlene Dumas, Andersson’s oeuvre is shaped by an interrogation of the image. Her paintings are not arbiters of truth but a point of entrance into the vast, murky shores of human memory and the landscapes onto which it latches. Hon feels strikingly cinematic, as though imminently the camera will pan out, and the interior world of the protagonist will be juxtaposed with the vastness of the world she inhabits. Indeed, Andersson’s rich corpus of ordinary domestic interiors, still lifes, and rugged Swedish landscapes forms a kind of painterly noir. ‘I always used to think I would work with film,’ she reflects. ‘I feel I’ve succeeded, because that’s what I do, in a way’ (M. Andersson in conversation with L. Norén, in Mamma Andersson, exh. cat. Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2007, n.p.). Like a film, Hon invites the viewer to enter a new realm, a pictorial ‘elsewhere’, in which memory and time—symbolised by the gleaming, blank watch-face at the centre of the composition—slip, stretch, and are suspended.
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.