Barbro Östlihn

Few Swedish, late 20th century, artists penetrated one single area of painting as consistently as Barbro Östlihn did, specializing in large-scale, geometrically patterned paintings. Many of her hard-edge canvases were abstracted from architectural details —doors, portals, moldings, roofs, skyscrapers— while others were modeled on natural objects such as flowers. Her cool aesthetic approach marked her rejection of the tenets of Abstract Expressionism and put her squarely within the burgeoning Pop art movement. Yet many early critics described her paintings as abstract and precisionist, tinged with the mysterious qualities of surrealism and the decadent nature of art nouveau – anything but Pop. One critic, erroneously, classified her as a mere “in-law of the movement,” owing to her marriage in 1960 to the Pop artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928 – 1976, legendary and productive multimedia artist, author and poet, working in many genres, often dealing with political and social issues, who was married to Östhlin between 1960 and 1976). Östlihn supported her husband’s career by producing many of his famous paintings, like Dr. Livingstone, I Presume, (1960 – 1961, ink on cotton, 228.5 x 239 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, donated by Daniel Cordier) and participating in his Happenings, while simultaneously building her own reputation and critical success. The variety of cultural and social spaces that Barbro Östlihn lived in contrasted with the consistency of her work, and, as pointed out by Annika Öhrner PhD (who wrote her doctoral dissertation [Barbro Östlihn & New York: konstens rum och möjligheter, Uppsala university, 2010] about Barbro Östlihn): “She fulfilled the role as a housewife in Sweden and lived the life of a Bohemian in New York, was both a mother and an artist, had strong artistic integrity and at the same time worked loyally with her husband, Öyvind Fahlström. It was often hard to unite the different roles, and she probably had to pay a high price” (Barbro Östlihn - liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art, 2003).

Östlihn grew up in a typical Swedish middle-class home in the prosperous, and modern, suburb of Bromma, on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the academic year of 1948 – 1949 she was accepted as a student at the Konstfack School of Arts Crafts and Design where she attended the Department of Decorative Painting, and befriended fellow student Gunilla Palmstierna (1928 – 2022, Swedish designer, sculptor, ceramicist, and actress, who worked regularly as a set and costume designer for Swedish director Ingmar Bergman [1918 – 2007] between 1966 and 1989, and was married to German writer, painter, and director Peter Weiss [1916 – 1982] between 1964 and 1982).

After a brief pause Östlihn returned to Konstfack in the autumn of 1951, and graduated with distinction in 1954. By that time, she had already gained entry, in 1953, to the Royal University College of Fine Art in Stockholm where she studied together with artist Björn Hallström (1931 – 2001). Östlihn and Hallström, who knew each other from Konstfack, were married in 1952 after which they had a daughter (Ann) in 1955 and a son (Erik) in 1957. Öhrner writes (in Barbro Östlihn. Liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden, 2003):

Outside school and college, she lived the traditional part of a woman, fulfilling a role as a mother and a wife. She was often knitting between classes, making clothes for her family. She also helped her husband. […] She was aware of her visual and technical talents, and was supportive of her husband’s work, but also had a sense of not belonging: ‘I was better than the male students but was not quite taken seriously’. In the daytime she took care of her children, and in the evenings, when they had gone to bed, she went to work for a few hours in her studio on Skeppsholmen, until she had to be back in time to get a few hours’ sleep before the children got up. 

In the second half of the 1950s tensions grew in the Östlihn and Hallström marriage. At the same time, the decade introduced a new avant-garde scene in Stockholm, especially pronounced in poetry and art. Through her husband Östlihn was slowly drawn into these circles where she, at the opening of his exhibition at Galerie Blanche on the 4th of April 1959, met the multitalented young artist Öyvind Fahlström, who was just starting to establish himself on the artistic and literary scene. In the autumn of 1959, Östlihn and Hallström divorced, after which Östlihn entered into a relationship with Fahlström. Now followed a period of uncertainty in Östlihn’s life. She neither had a place to live, nor a steady income, which denied her the means to take care of her children, who lived with their father. The precarious situation stabilized somewhat, however, when Östlihn got married to Fahlström on the 14th of December 1960.

Östlihn and Fahlström had spent the previous summer in Antibes, on the French Riviera, where they lived and worked close to Gunilla Palmstierna. Several of Östlihn’s paintings from this summer shows a new feature and as pointed out by Öhrner: “For the first time she uses the wall as the basic of the picture. She had found one of the basic structures in her painting: the façade as a pictorial surface. This was a self-imposed limitation, which, it would soon appear, brought endless possibilities.” (Barbro Östlihn. Liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden, 2003).

These new pictorial ideas would come to fruition during the following years (1961 – 1976) in New York, where Östlihn and Fahlström (each with a brand-new scholarship) would arrive full of enthusiasm on the 13th of October 1961. Östlihn’s mature production would, hereafter, mark out its own path, slightly away from the mainstream in both Swedish and American art, and she is one of the most singular Swedish artists of the post-war era.

When Östlihn came to Manhattan in 1961, the experiences of painting she brought with her developed in a completely novel direction in the new environment. Östlihn’s paintings are characterized by the tension between a strictly organized surface and the sensual impact of colour. The titles of Östlihn’s paintings often indicate a geographical place by means of street addresses, preferably on Manhattan, or names of specific buildings in Stockholm or New York. In connection with the exhibition Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint (Gothenburg Museum of Art, 12 March – 25 September 2022), Museum Director Patrik Steorn wrote:

Barbro Östlihn had the ability to transform the surrounding world to art. However, the artist is not chiefly interested in the teeming life of the urban space, rather her paintings depict the facades of buildings that constitute the framework and backdrop of the drama on the streets. The architecture’s monumental size is reflected in the large format of her canvases, but her selection of edifices also tells a tale of walks, memories and a personal history. Brick by brick, Östlihn builds up the motif, creating a structured surface with the aid of meticulous brushstrokes. The artist’s painstaking technique corresponds to the handiwork involved in the building’s construction; the effect is both decorative and overwhelming. Her closed facades appear to us as mute witnesses to the emerging society of the spectacle, in which global events and everyday life are intermingled. They occupy the public space with self-evident dignity, yet at the same time appear to contain hidden pathways to another world.

Östlihn exhibited at Cordier & Ekstrom in November 1963. This solo exhibition comprised more than twenty paintings from the period 1961 – 1963, including the first frontal ‘house paintings’, as well as Pawn Shop (1962, oil on canvas, 156 x 178 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, NM 5816) and Gas-Station (1963, oil on canvas, 127 x 168 cm, private collection, Paris). Further solo exhibitions followed at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (1966 and 1968), where she showed works like Erik’s House, Lego (1965, oil on canvas, 225 x 144, cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MOM/2003/116).

It wasn’t until 1968 that Östlihn had a solo exhibition in Sweden, at Galerie Burén, Stockholm. The following year she was selected to represent Sweden at the 10th São Paulo Art Biennial in Brazil. The Swedish participation was, however, cancelled for political reasons, and the nine works, from 1964 to 1969, were shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm instead. The following year she participated in a travelling exhibition in the Federal Republic of Germany, organized by NUNSKU, the Swedish Committee for Art Exhibitions Abroad. Östlihn was also one of the only women to be included in the landmark Pop Art exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1969, where she, once again, showed Gas-Station. Interestingly enough the curators, Suzi Gablic and John Russel, wrote that their stocktaking of Pop Art included: “Anglo-American pop only. We had no room for French, German, Italian or Japanese Pop and, in any case, these seems to us to be basically derivative of English and American Pop”.

Östlihn continued to find motifs in named facades in the 1970s, with titles such as Bowery Wall (1972), 2nd Avenue Wall(1973), 10th Street Wall (1977), Forsyth Street Wall (1979) and so on, all addresses within walking distance of the new studio. However, as pointed out by Öhrner (in Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint, exhibition catalogue, Gothenburg Museum of Art, 2022):

the visual code and pictorial space itself have now undergone a change. Smaller squares now build up the façade, in the manner of a mosaic that criss-crosses every inch of the canvas in horizontal and vertical lines. The format now adheres to a different logic than that of the façade; all the canvases in what I call the ‘Wall series’ have the same format, 180 x 153 cm. Suddenly the paintings have an extension in space that is compatible with the human body, so that they can encompass the viewer’s body if one comes close. There are still remnants of symmetry in the compositions, but here Östlihn also works with diagonals and counterpoint. The work often address the viewer in a way that allows the body to move more freely in the horizontal dimension compared with the centralizing paintings from earlier years. […] During the 1970s, Östlihn’s paintings still put into play a dynamics between micro and macro formal elements, but they are less part of the image and more part of the wall and exhibition space than before.

In 1975 Östlihn and Fahlström separated (one of the reasons being Sharon Avery, Fahlström’s young assistant, who was hired to relieve Östlihn). Östlihn soon met her future life companion Charles Dreyfus (born 1947, French cultural critic, historian, poet and artist connected to the Fluxus movement), however, in New York. Östlihn and Fahlström both spent late summer of 1976 in Sweden. Fahlström had cancer and was rapidly getting worse. On the 25th of October they went to a lawyer to get a divorce. Fahlström then married Sharon Avery on his sickbed, before dying on the 9th of November.

By this time Östlihn had moved from New York to Paris where she was living with Dreyfus, until her death in 1995. The move didn’t mean that her contacts with New York ceased however, and she had a solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery (eight large paintings from the Wall series, painted in the years before she left for Paris) in 1978. From her new base in Europe, she had frequent solo exhibitions at Galerie Aronowitsch, Stockholm (1976, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1988 and 1991) as well as Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris (1978). Her works were now slowly entering public, as well as private, collections, but it wasn’t until the exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Barbro Östlihn. Målningar från New York – Stockholm – Paris 1962 - 1983, 21 January – 4 March) in 1984 that she, finally, became firmly established.

This would, regrettably, not prove to be a lasting success, however. As Annika Öhrner, so poignantly, puts it (in Barbro Östlihn. Liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden, 2003): “For a long time Barbro Östlihn and William Aronowitsch planned an exhibition for his Stockholm gallery in the spring of 1995. Barbro, who did not like to go to the doctor, had suffered from stomach pain. On January 27, 1995, she died in Paris. The medical cause was never established.”

Thanks to a handful of exhibitions in the years following her death, like The ecstatic house. Barbro Östlihn’s New York Paintings, Arkipelag, Stockholm – European Culture Capital 1998 and the retrospective Barbro Östlihn, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden, 2003, her oeuvre began -around the turn of the millennium- to gain recognition in the narratives about Swedish post-war art history.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation