COCO x TATE
In 2018 we created a bespoke collection for the TATE. We enveloped some of our most popular chocolate flavours in four artworks owned by the TATE.
We wrapped our Salted Caramel Milk Chocolate Bar in Winifred Nicholson 1923's oil painting 'Window-Sill, Lugano'. In this artwork the artist, who is known for combining the genres of still life and landscape, adopts a naïve style in an attempt to unlearn traditional picture-making habits, generating a fresh vision of the subject. Our Gin & Tonic Dark Chocolate Bar for TATE featured one of the six 'untitled' pieces of Jean Spencer's last collection of works. Across her long career Spencer's work was focused on the central principle of clarity, both visual and conceptual. The series from which this piece was taken is made of six identically sized panels arranged in sequence; each one divided into horizontal bands or blocks of colour varying in size. The artist places stripes of different hue, tone and intensity next to each other, in an attempt to explore the impact one has on its neighbour. The piece featured on our chocolate's wrapper was painted in 1997, one year before Spencer's death.
We enveloped our Cold Brew Coffee Dark Chocolate Bar in 'The Fig Tree' (1912) by Spencer Gore. The artist was fascinated by everyday life London scenes. In this painting he captures the fig tree that grew in his neighbour's garden. This was not uncommon for Gore, as he often painted the view from windows of houses and flats he lived in. Our Colombian Milk Chocolate, which is 40%, was wrapped in David Bomberg's 'The Mud Bath' (1910). Bomberg based his modern portrayal of bathing on steam baths used by the local Jewish population of East London, where the artist lived. The artist was closely associated to the Vorticists, a group of artists who aimed to create work that represented the modern world using imagery derived from machines and the urban environment. This influence on his work is evident in this piece, as Bomberg reduces the human body to a number of geometric shapes.
