XXI Mur Bleu avec Bande

Barbro Östlihn’s remarkable oeuvre must be regarded as one of the most intriguing in the history of postwar Swedish art. During the 1960s, in the midst of the Manhattan circles where American pop art and neo-realism were being moulded, she developed her very own idiom, completely in step with her time but still with a refreshingly unique personal expression.

With her restrained and systematic painterly style, she established a position in the New York art world, where her circle of acquaintances and friends included artists such as Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008, American painter and graphic artist, whose early works anticipated the pop art movement; known for his Combines, 1954–1964, a group of artworks that incorporated everyday objects as materials and that blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture), Frank Stella (1931–2004, American artist, associated with the pop art movement, who worked in painting, collage, and sculpture), Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022, Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects), Tom Wesselman (1936–2024, American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997, American pop artist who rose to prominence in the 1960s through pieces which were inspired by popular advertising and the comic book style).

Östlihn is increasingly being regarded as one of the most important Swedish artists of the late 20th century. Her career was more international than Swedish, and in the 1960s she travelled between Stockholm and New York, where she had solo exhibitions at several of the most important contemporary art galleries of the time.

Östlihn mainly painted the flat facades and abstracted architecture of urban space, often basing her work on her own photographs, painting strict and austere compositions, and finding her motifs in Manhattan as well as Stockholm, in celebrated compositions like 299 Grand St. NYC (1963, oil on canvas, 152 x 106.5 cm, Firestorm Foundation) and Mary Magdalen (1968, oil on canvas, 255 x 230 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MOM/2005/15).

XXI Mur Bleu avec Bande, executed after her relocation back to Europe,belongs to the final phase of Östlihn’s distinctively unique production. In 1975, Östlihn experienced a painful breakup from her husband, 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). Around the same time, French Fluxus artist Charles Dreyfus (born 1947, contemporary artist, philosopher, and poet), who had just finished editing the exhibition catalogue Fluxus Documents for Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, visited New York. Östlihn and Dreyfus met, fell in love, and subsequently left New York together to settle in Paris, in April 1976. Annika Öhrner, PhD (who wrote her doctoral dissertation [Barbro Östlihn & New York: konstens rum och möjligheter, Uppsala University, 2010] about Barbro Östlihn) writes, (in Barbro Östlihn. Liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden, 2003):

For Barbro, living in Paris meant living more in the margin. At first Charles Dreyfus and Barbro lived at Rue Ferdinand Duval in the fourth arrondissement, and after 1982 at Rue Trousseau in the eleventh. As she had been used to, the flat was both home and studio, and she continued to paint at night, in electrical light. In the US she had had a Green Card, but in Paris she didn’t have a work permit. Their economy was strained, as it often is for artists, not the least when not living in their home country. Since she had been away from Sweden for so long, she had not gained access to the system of artistic grants. But she worked with William Aronowitsch, and after 1976 she exhibited at his gallery in Stockholm. She also had a solo show at Galerie Baudoin Lebon in Paris in 1978 and 1982. A milestone for Barbro Östlihn was her exhibition in 1984 at Moderna Museet, curated by Björn Springfeldt, showing paintings from 1962 and later.

Geometricising elements, where squares (or rectangles) build up parts of the composition, admittedly appear in Östlihn’s paintings already towards the end of the 1960s, in works such as 17th William Street (1966, oil on canvas, 143 x 178 cm), while 4th Avenue Wall (1974, oil on canvas, 178 x 153 cm), where Östlihn complements the predominantly deep blue colour of the composition with a lighter, clearly defined field, can be seen as an early version of the theme in the later series Mur Bleu avec Bande. It was in Paris, however, that Östlihn turned to an even sparser painting style, with subjects frequently being nothing more than minor elements of walls or parquet floors, often reduced in size. These abstract canvases would also, not rarely, form series of paintings with identical motifs (albeit sometimes with varied colour constellations) in an elaborate manner verging on minimalism. Annika Öhrner, once again, writes (in Barbro Östlihn. Liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden, 2003):

In the 1980’s, Barbro Östlihn’s art changed in important respects. The reduction was taken one step further. The compositions were now constructed around one element of form -a square, a rhombus, an octagon etc.- which is repeated in the painting. But she still takes the form from the visual world beyond the painting. […] In the Wall series from the 1970s, there is an overall form in the composition and a marked direction. In the later works, this aspect disappears. Like pattern units in textile printing, every painting can, in principle, be hung in four different ways […] and since they can be combined in different ways with the other paintings in the series there are many possibilities. The paintings are always dominated by one colour, and the effects on the micro level are produced through shading. In every small facet, the colour produces a refined light charging the painting.

Östlihn began the Mur Bleu avec Bande series in the late 1970s/early 1980s. II Mur Bleu avec Bande (oil on canvas, 47 x 38 cm, Solna municipality, Sweden), for example, was executed in 1980, and (according to the catalogue compiled by Öhrner in 2003), interestingly enough, XXI Mur Bleu avec Bande, dated 1986, was to become the final work in this suite.

When some of these remarkable abstract works from the 1980s were included in the celebrated 1984 exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Torsten Ekbom (1938-2014, Swedish author, translator, and art critic) wrote (in Barbro Östlihn. Målningar från New York. Stockholm. Paris 1962-1983, exhibition catalogue, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 21 January - 4 March 1984):

If stylisation and abstraction are carried far enough, the bounds of the identifiable will be exceeded, and the thing reproduced will be transformed into a kind of second nature. It is this point of intersection that Barbro Östlihn is looking for in her paintings. […] A majestic silence reigns in these paintings. Perhaps that is what happens when you remove the ‘aspects’ of recognition from that picture of reality which our habitual way of seeing has created. You reach emptiness, white space. Mondrian has demonstrated it, and so has Malevitch. Barbro Östlihn’s art belongs in that tradition. She has gone the same way from fairly sturdy representational painting to increasingly marked rarefaction and abstraction, which finally leaves us only the colour planes, slowly fading and vanishing into thin air like the grin of the Cheshire cat.

Signed and dated verso: ‘OSTLIHN 1986’.

Inscribed on stretcher: ‘XXI MUR BLEU AVEC BANDE, 1986. -BARBRO ÖSTLIHN. (O.P.D. 47 x 38 cm.)’.

Provenance

Galerie Aronowitsch, Stockholm.

Private collection (acquired from the above).

Sefina pantbank (Sefina pawn shop), Örebro, Sweden.

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 662, Contemporary Art & Design, 15-16 April 2025, lot 149.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Literature

(Ed.) Annika Öhrner, Barbro Östlihn - liv och konst, exhibition catalogue, Norrköping Museum of Art,Norrköping, Sweden, 2003, listed in the catalogue, p. 138.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation