Barbro Östlihn – among the facades of Manhattan

Contemporary Art & Design presents

Barbro Östlihn, ”299 Grand St. NYC.”

Today, Barbro Östlihn is considered one of Sweden’s most important artists and just this year, she was in the news with a major retrospective exhibition of her work at Göteborgs konstmuseum. However, her career was always more international than Swedish. During Östlihn’s lifetime, her work was not particularly noticed in her country of birth, despite her having had solo shows at several of the most important contemporary art galleries in New York and Paris. Fortunately, in later years, her paintings have begun to be more and more praised and appreciated in Sweden too.

Barbro Östlihn and her husband Öyvind Fahlström moved to New York in the autumn of 1961. Thanks to their contacts, they quickly became part of the New York art scene, and many of the artist friends that they socialised with are associated with the Pop Art movement. Included in their circle of friends were, for example, Claire and Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The Östlihn/Fahlström couple lived and worked in the studio on 128 Font Street that the artist Robert Rauschenberg had just vacated. They had arrived in New York to find new inspiration and material for their work. To them, all motifs in Europe, and particularly in Paris, were exhausted. Paris was too beautiful and had by now become an artistic cliché. In New York, on the other hand, they found a run-down city that was not romantic but ugly and flawed and, therefore, could be used in their work without being compared to other artists. Here Östlihn developed a stylised painting based on the facades and buildings of Manhattan, which at the time were being torn down to make room for skyscrapers. As Östlihn wandered across the city with her camera, she documented the big city as it transformed. She was often seen by bewildered people who wondered why she was taking close-ups of facades and houses – thinking it was strange to take pictures with no people in them. Östlihn, however, quickly discovered a method of relating artistically to her new environment, a method that she stuck to throughout the fifteen years she spent in New York.